


The Problem With Prayer Is The Answers Sound Like Accidents

by Sethrial



Category: After the Storm - Hannah Birchwood & Key Dyson & Raymond Roach
Genre: Brain Damage, History of abuse, I just like hurting my OCs okay, M/M, Medium Burn, Mental Illness, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, it's like a slow burn for impatient people
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:01:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 41,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28369545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sethrial/pseuds/Sethrial
Summary: Gabriel shrugs expansively. He has no idea why anything happens, except that god is cruel and capricious and hates him in particular. That’s the only sensible explanation for his entire life that he’s been able to find, and it keeps making more sense the more that happens to him.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

“Gabriel?” Ben asks when he lands. Ben looks nothing like his profile picture, at least not the one that Gabriel saw when he looked into his new posting. His hair is significantly longer, grayer, and wilder, and he’s a good bit heavier than he was when the photograph was taken. The cold, steady stare is the same, and translates perfectly from still image to real life, but that’s about it.

The _Reliant_ requested him specifically, and nothing Gabriel has found or been given about his new home has any information about why they want him so badly. Ben, or someone above him, wanted Gabriel here as soon as possible, and they were willing to put up with a lot of restrictions to get him so fast. He should probably still be in the hospital at this point, and Gabriel has been told it’s going to be at least another month before he can work a full shift at a time. He’s on half shifts twice a day until then, or less, and two rest days a week with an optional third one if he needs it. He has to talk to a medic and fill out a form if he does, but Gabriel has a theoretical four day work week if he can’t pull more than that. Ben has to know that, and he wanted him anyway. Or the Captain did and Ben is stuck with him. Gabriel doesn’t know which hypothetical is worse.

“Were you expecting someone else?” Gabriel asks dryly, then bites the inside of his lip. He needs to stop mouthing off before he gets himself into trouble here, too.

Ben snorts, and Gabriel catches a one-pixel smile at the corner of his mouth. “Great. Another smart-ass.”

“Would you have preferred a dumb-ass? I’m told I do a good impression,” Gabriel says politely, and earns a chuckle. Okay, this director has a sense of humor. Gabriel just might be able to survive here. If he can make himself likable and not get in the way too much, he’ll get through this until he’s able to pull his weight. Then he can lean on being a hard worker and get along at least as well as he did on the _Washington_.

“Stow the attitude and I’ll show you around,” Ben says gruffly, like he’s trying to be stern.

Oh fantastic. Gabriel is being treated to a tour of his new home by his new director, personally. Okay. He can manage this. One step at a time. He’ll get through this quietly, professionally, and without being a problem. If it turns into a fight, well, he’s been punched before. It’s honestly not that bad, and between his new eye and therapist he can probably get moved off-ship again before he takes on any structural damage.

The _Reliant_ is supposed to be absurdly prosocial, though, so it’s not likely he’s going to get in a fight on his first day. It doesn’t entirely stop Gabriel from being nervous and fidgety on the tour, twitching at nothing and doing everything he can to not let on how jumpy he is in a new place, with two hundred new people that all already know each other, and his director taking a personal interest in him fresh off the hopper.

He absorbs most of the tour, enough to learn where the important things are. Gabriel’s berth is small, but clean, furnished, and functional, and all of the community spaces all look well-kept and usable. There are no signs of aggression, nothing to indicate that he needs to keep his guard up in public or stay in his quarters and out of the way. Gabriel only gets a quick glance around, most sections of the ship, but he doesn’t see anything conspicuously broken or missing, or anyone with the hunted, anxious, worn down look of a frequent target. This might actually be the prosocial ship it’s supposed to be, instead of somewhere with lax security and a crew that knows how to keep their mouths shut. That could be a nice change of pace.

Ben keeps looking back at him while they walk, like he’s making sure he’s still there. Gabriel has no idea where he thinks he might have gone. He doesn’t exactly have a quiet tread, or know his way around yet. If things take a dangerous turn, Gabriel will find somewhere else to be, but for now he has nowhere else to be and nothing to do except enjoy his personal tour of the _Reliant._

“Something on my face?” he asks the fifth time Ben glances back at him.

Ben snorts. “Caught that, huh?”

Gabriel shrugs, for lack of anything interesting to say. Ben wasn’t exactly being subtle about it. “Sorry.”

“You’re fine,” Ben brushes the apology off. “It’s just good to see you in one piece.”

“Ah.” Gabriel says. That doesn’t bode well. “So, I take it you saw me in… more than one piece.” He still doesn’t know how to talk about what happened. If he remembered more of it he might be able to find better words for everything he went through, but he doesn’t have anything between the storm alarms in early August and waking up in the hospital three weeks ago, and a lot of his memories before then are disjointed and confusing. It’s like it all happened to someone else, and then Gabriel got substituted in at the hospital.

“I’m the one who found you,” Ben says.

“Oh.” Great. So Ben is definitely aware of what’s going on with his head, and what he did to the poor Mall, and he requested Gabriel be moved here, to this ship, specifically, in spite of all his restrictions. He twists his index finger around in its socket and tries to think of anything he can say that isn’t stupid, aggressive, pathetic, or some mix of the three.

“Relax, kid. I’m just glad you’re back in one piece.”

“Four. Four pieces,” Gabriel says automatically.

“What?”

“Three fingers and one eye are… are fake.” This joke is significantly funnier when you can see his mismatched hands and he doesn’t have to explain it. “Wait. Bugger.” He counts on his fingers. “That’s five pieces when you account for the rest of me,” he says to himself. “Can I start over?”

Ben rubs between his eyebrows like he’s developing a Gabriel-based headache, but he’s smiling and… almost laughing. It’s silent and not at all natural looking in his shoulders, but either that was funnier than Gabriel thought or Ben is having a seizure. “I’m glad you’re doing okay. IST lounge.” He points to the door they stopped in front of. “Go make friends.”

Gabriel guesses he’s going to go make some friends today, too.

  
  


“James?” Gabriel asks, landing on the technician in the back. What are the chances? He was certain James was going into engineering, and now he’s here?

“Gabe? Holy shit! I thought you were dead!”

“Do you know each other?” Miguel asks, looking between them. Over sized, out of place Gabriel with his canvas gloves and odd scars and data rings, all aberrations from the clean, whole, competent technicians of the Reliant he’s supposed to be meeting, who are splitting their stares between the two of them.

“We were interns together for a year, like five years ago. His first year overlapped with my last. I interned on the _Washington_ because it was supposed to open doors or something and my parents were pushing me toward engineering. Never did figure out how Gabe landed that internship.”

“Oh, uh, Miss Beatrice thought it best if all the transplants stayed on the same ship while we were acclimating. It made getting to classes on time easier, I’ll admit.”

“Miss Beatrice as in _Beatrice Clearwater?”_ James asks.

“Yes! She wasn’t admiral yet, and she was all sorts of interested in life in the colony and what that was like,” Gabriel explains. It wasn’t that odd, knowing her before she was someone important. She knew enough about his past and lifestyle to be curious about it, he knew the basics of her parentage and none of what that meant for her, and they could usually find something more fun to talk about on any given day than their parents.

“I have… so many questions,” Basil says. He’s on the taller side and has a sweet, open face. Gabriel thinks he might make a good friend, if they can get past the awkward meeting stage. He’s not certain, but it looks a bit like he might be hiding a prosthetic as well, with one hand covered and no visible reason to be wearing a work glove.

“Gabe was raised in the Mackinac Island cult,” James explains in his usual blunt way.

“The what?”

“We weren’t a cult,” Gabriel says. “Religion wasn’t compulsory, just… very strongly encouraged.” There were people who didn’t go to church. He knows that much. His father complained about them constantly.

“Church leaders were government leaders, outsiders were distrusted, weird caste system, the works,” James explains, and Gabriel regrets, not for the first time, ever telling anyone about how he grew up.

“We didn’t really have a central government, so no government leaders,” he says. “But… the rest of it is more or less accurate, yes. A few of us washed up in the north end of the fleet’s territory a few years ago and the rest of the colony was destroyed, completely washed away by a category seven, down to the foundations. The few of us left alive made new lives here and have been acclimating with varying levels of success. It’s been quite exciting.”

“What?” Basil asks again, looking more lost than ever.

“Don’t worry!” Gabriel holds up his hands to indicate innocence, then remembers the gloves and the rings and the fact that you can kind of see his prosthesis on one side, and clasps them behind his back with a winning, friendly smile. “I’ve- I’ve completely left that part of my life behind. Completely in tune with, and fully happy to live in a socialist dictatorship. Not sad to be done with hereditary theological oligarchies or- or oppressively stratified interpersonal regimes at all!”

The crew, his new crew, are staring at him like he’s grown a second head.

“Good to know you never learned to talk like a human,” James says. “But seriously, how in the fuck are you not dead?”

Gabriel looks at him blankly for a few seconds. “I don’t understand the question.”

“We’ve been cleaning up what you did to the mall for weeks. People talk. The mall’s techs had a lot to say about you when they thought no one was listening. All of that is in evidence now, by the way. You’re _welcome_.”

“Thank you,” Gabriel says automatically.

“Don’t fucking thank me for that!” James snaps.

“I’m… sorry?” Gabriel tries.

“Don’t apologize either! Shit like this is why you got bullied so much as an intern. Shit.”

Gabriel looks at him with concern. “I’m very sorry if I’ve done something to offend you, but you’re going to have to tell me what it is and why you’re upset, because I have absolutely no idea what I’ve done wrong right now.”

“It’s- You- You’re just. Gah! You’re fucking useless!” James throws his hands up and stomps off in a huff. Just out the door, he sticks his head back in. “Welcome to the fucking _Reliant_.” Then he stomps down the hall, boots echoing.

Gabriel has a quiet giggle to himself, hidden behind a concerned hand over his mouth. James hasn’t changed at all. He’s the same short tempered, rude, uncontrollable asshole he’s always been, with exactly the same extremely pushable buttons. It’s nice that at least one thing is familiar.

The big guy with the red hair, Rich, if Gabriel has his names straight, looks at Gabriel and raises an eyebrow. “That was on purpose,” he says.

Gabriel furrows his eyebrows. “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry. Can you explain?”

Rich chuckles. “Alright man.”

“Are you actually from a cult, or was James bullshitting?” Basil asks.

Gabriel sighs. He understands the curiosity, honestly, but he can still wish people would leave it alone. “I am, actually. But the community I was raised in is almost entirely gone, only five of us left that I know of, and the younger half of those of us in the fleet aren’t planning to raise our own families with those ideals. We’re hoping that they’ll die with us, sad as that is to say aloud. The world will, overall, be kinder for it.”

“That’s… really sad, yeah. Rough childhoods, right?” Basil asks with an inviting sort of smile.

Gabriel smiles back. “It wasn’t all bad. I like to think I turned out stronger for it.”

“Yeah.” He’s looking at Gabriel’s arms and shoulders, at how standard fleet shirts don’t fit right unless he gets a size too big, at how he’s lost every lick of padding he had and a bit of muscle besides. Basil bites his lip. “Yeah, strong.”

“Okay,” Nate says, “In the nicest way possible, trying not to be rude or insensitive or anything, what happened at the mall? We got about half a bullshit story from the techs there and have been digging through your code and their attempts to fix it for weeks. I thought she was messed up before, man, but holy shit. What the hell did they do to you?”

“Oh,” Gabriel says. Right, this. He had a plan for how to explain things. “Oh, um. I- I take- I have some medication I’m supposed to take every day to keep me focused, and present, and… aware of my surroundings,” that sounds fine. He sounds like he has one of those focus disorders, where people can’t work a cerebral job unless they have something to put their brain on the straight and narrow. “My director learned that when I don’t take it, I work faster and can do double shifts without complaining. He stopped… stopped letting me take it. I kind of… lost track of- of what I was doing. I was still working, but I wasn’t really aware of what my work was doing and didn’t have any reason for the changes I was making except… except it made the mall happier to- to break.” He laces and unlaces his fingers awkwardly, fidgeting a little. “It’s- It’s alright now, though. I’m back on my medication now, on a proper fleet ship with proper medical personnel instead of… instead of what the mall had.” The less he goes into that, the better. “I’m on short shifts for- for a bit, but not for long. Another month at the outside. I’m- I’m looking forward to getting back to work,” Gabriel finishes with his best attempt at a smile. He’s going to get back to work, fix the mall, and then everything will be fine.

“Are you… okay?” Miguel asks. He takes half a step forward, toward Gabriel, and Gabriel takes a full step back, well out of reach.

“Fine. Fine, why do you ask?”

“Because you kind of look like you’re about to spontaneously combust,” Miguel says, but he doesn’t move any closer, and actually backs away again. “It’s… You know, it’s okay if you’re not okay with telling your entire life story in one sitting, or with being in a room full of new people, or with being, like, touched. A lot of us have stuff like that.”

“Yeah,” Rich says. “My last posting was a bad time. We just… don’t talk about it.”

“We’ve got a couple old injuries, a couple bad childhoods,” Basil adds. “Nothing serious or, like, life threatening, but… yeah. We don’t have to dig into anything uncomfortable, especially not on day one.”

“Touch my hair and suffer the consequences!” Nate quips, and the tension breaks. Miguel laughs and reaches for his head, Nate karate chops his hand away and makes an action movie noise, and then they’re a bunch of boys, young men who have never had a hard day in their lives, goofing off together.

Gabriel takes a breath, then another, to settle his pounding pulse. “Alright. Yeah. I’m excited to get back to work. End of sentence.”

“That’s the spirit!” Miguel says. He’s still going for Nate’s hair, fending off karate chops with ninja moves of his own. No one looks nervous or annoyed. Nobody is calling for security or teaming up into sides or factions. Well, Nate looks annoyed, but it’s just a game.

Gabriel backs away from their rowdy reaching and playing. “Well, if no one has any more questions, I think I’m going to go for a walk.” Between the tour with Ben and now this, his nerves feel like a frayed rope whipping in the wind. A nice, long walk and maybe a bit of reading will settle him, and then maybe he’ll be able to sleep at a decent hour tonight.

“Great to meet you,” Rich says. He has his arms out, like, yup, he gets an armful of Miguel and lifts him over his head, holding him like a bale of hay while Nate reaches for him to mock punch and make more ninja noises.

“Yeah, see you later.”

“Peace.”

“Put me down you fucking prick!”

Everything is fine. It's a game. Gabriel just needs to take a walk, have some time to himself, and everything will be fine. It doesn't stop him from needing to lean against a wall for a second and find his center again, once he's alone in the hall, but he's fine. 


	2. Chapter 2

There are a couple of young, bulky mechanics lifting weights, but the two treadmills are free. Gabriel picks the one that looks slightly more worn, sets it to a relaxed walking speed, and settles in to enjoy the act of moving for a few hours.

Once he finds his pace on the new treadmill, he brings up his library app on his data rings and opens the book he’s reading for fun right now. He’s having a day and a half, so he decides he can become a better informed and more educated citizen tomorrow. Today he wants to get lost in cheap fiction. He sets his screen to stay steady in the air, holds onto one bar of the treadmill so he doesn’t have to pay attention to where he’s going or how fast, and settles in to read, walk, and stop worrying.

After an hour or so, the mechanics leave and Gabriel is alone in the gym. He gets well and truly invested in his book, and stops making an effort to not express along with the story. Becca Adler, adventurer for hire, and her series of fantastical adventures is a little young for him, according to the recommended age range, but he loves the straightforward twists and turns of a pulp fantasy series. It’s been running long enough to keep him entertained for more than a year now, even though he chews through the short novels in a day or two of active reading, and he still has a huge backlog of books to read before he’s caught up with the most recent one.

Becca is face to sword with a gargantuan snake, blindfolded to avoid its paralyzing gaze, listening for its movement and waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Her breath has caught in her chest and her hands tremor, but her footing is steady. Any wrong move could be her last, and then she’ll be nothing but a statue, her soul trapped forever in stone, or maybe simply dead on the ground in the maze at the end of the earth.

Gabriel has his thumb knuckle between his teeth and is wide eyed and breathless, reading as fast as he can to see what happens next. She has to get out of this. She absolutely has to win, doesn’t she? There are another hundred pages of novel left, and fifty-plus more books in the series, and that would make absolutely no sense if this is the end of the titular character. The snake lunges. She has to get out of this, but how?

“You know it’s bad for the treadmill to leave it running dry, right?” a voice next to him says.

Gabriel jumps a mile. “What!”

There’s a young man with a shock of ginger hair and deeply tanned skin walking next to him. His blue tank top and black exercise shorts say off-duty security, getting his daily workout. His expression says he didn’t realize how badly Gabriel would startle.

“It’s bad for the treadmill to run with no one walking on it,” he explains patiently. “Wears out the motor. We only have the two, and if one of them breaks we’re going to be down to one for at least a month.”

“Oh. It’s. It’s not?” Gabriel says. “I’ve been walking on it the entire time. Don’t worry. I won’t leave it running when I’m done.”

“You’ve been walking for five miles?” the security guard asks.

“Yes?” He’s been going at a slow pace for about an hour and a half. That adds up. Then he notices the analogue display on the treadmill that tells him how far he’s gone in this session. 5.4 miles. Oh, that’s useful. He may actually be able to gauge his average speed now and track how far he walks for his mood journal.

“You’re serious?”

“Yes? Is there a problem with that?” Please don’t let there be. He can live with not having hot food unless he cooks it, and the ship rocking under his feet constantly, but if he can’t even have his walks here Gabriel is going to go absolutely bonkers.

“How far can you walk?” he demands.

Gabriel rears back a bit. “As- as far as I need to. It’s just walking.”

“Okay but like how many miles can you do in a day?”

“Um.” He hasn’t actually tested it, but Gabriel knows he can keep walking basically forever, as long as he has plenty of water and enough to eat and gets his eight hours of sleep. “Okay, sixteen hours at maximum of walking in a day, a good pace is three miles an hour, 48 miles? Am I doing my math right?”

“...What?”

“Wait, no, I’d need a few hours to eat. Assume an hour each to cook and eat three meals… 39 miles.”

“Have you ever walked that far in a day?” the officer looks slightly faint and completely baffled, like he can’t honestly believe anyone would walk that much on purpose.

“Of course not, but I could in theory, probably. My feet would be sore as anything afterwards, but I could do it if I had to.” Gabriel is still walking. The machine ticks over to 5.5 miles. “I average about ten miles a day, most days.” he explains.

The security guard nods and keeps nodding to himself, like Gabriel has just said something insane that he’s struggling to process.

“Are you alright?” Gabriel asks.

“Yeah. Yeah, there’s just this challenge some guys in security like to do, sometimes. It’s a ten mile walk. You have to do it all at once, and if you ever stop to rest you’re disqualified. People train for it for, like, months. And you do that every day? Like every single day?”

“Not… every day,” Gabriel says, trying to be polite. “I’m probably only going to walk another mile or two today. I still need to set up my room, and I want to get familiar with the kitchen here.” He also needs to stop by medical and make sure he’s set up to get his pills, and he has a shipment, his things from the mall, coming in at some point that he needs to go to the top deck to meet. It’s going to be a busy day, but he’ll be fine taking another hour to walk.

“Okay, so seven miles,” he still sounds like he doesn’t believe him.

“I’m Gabriel, by the way,” he introduces himself and very subtly changes the topic of conversation. “I’m the new technician here.”

“The one that got in today? That would explain why I haven’t heard of someone on the ship who can do the decathaday challenge without falling over!” he says brightly. “I’m Mitch, security officer extraordinaire. Champion of the weak, protector of the small, etc etc. You can come to me if anyone tries to give you any trouble.”

Gabriel looks down at him with a small, tight lipped smile, not sure if he’s making a joke or not. Mitch is a generous 5’6”, over a foot shorter than tall, wiry Gabriel, and looks nicely toned, but not exactly bulky looking or like he’d be particularly good in a fight. There’s also the fact that Gabriel is neither small nor weak, and definitely not in need of a champion. “If I happen to find myself in trouble, you’ll be the first one I call,” he says, playing along.

“Good! Doubt anyone’s going to try anything, since, you know-”

“I’m a bloody giant?” Gabriel finishes for him.

“I was going to say that this is the most prosocial ship in the fleet and no one ever starts fights here in the first place, but yeah, that too! How tall are you?”

“6’7” on a good day,” he says.

“How tall on a bad day?” Mitch asks.

“Still 6’7”, but I’ve hit my head on a doorway,” Gabriel says mildly.

Mitch snorfles a laugh into his hand. He’s extraordinarily young if that one got him. That’s one of the standard tall jokes, and not even one of the clever ones. “So are you mixed with anything fun, or is that all natural?”

Common question, and not one that carries any emotional weight for Gabriel anymore. There’s nothing wrong with having designer genes here, and no one would think anything of it if he did. “All natural, as far as I know. I’ve never had my genome sequenced, but it’s fairly unlikely I’m anything but a baseline.”

He used to get deeply angry when anyone asked where his height, hair, or eyes came from, but he’s grown up a lot in the last four years and doesn’t resent bearing a passing resemblance to a badly outcrossed archangel these days. He’s tall enough and has roughly the right coloration for their first generation, even if he is a meter too thin across the shoulders and not nearly chiseled enough. It’s honest curiosity, not a judgment of his creation, and there’s no reason to be upset about it.

“Interesting! I didn’t know we came in that size,” Mitch says.

“My parents were tall too,” Gabriel says.

Mitch quirks a small smile. “You too, huh?”

“Pardon?”

“Card carrying member of the no parents club? Same.”

“N-no, actually. My mother is still around, last I checked,” Gabriel says. “We just… aren’t exactly on speaking terms right now. Small disagreement a few years ago, and we never managed to make up.”

“Oh man. That’s rough. What are you fighting about?” Mitch asks, openly, brightly curious.

“Ah… religious disagreement. It’s rather complicated and would take quite some time to explain fully,” he says awkwardly.

“Well dang. Sorry.”

“Sorry your parents are… gone.” Gabriel pays attention to his treadmill for a moment, trying to figure out what to say next. He’s passed six miles, and still doesn’t know how to talk to strangers.

Mitch is nice, though, and just says, “Don’t worry about it. I never met them. Can’t miss what you never had, right?”

“Right,” Gabriel agrees. That tracks. If Mitch isn’t upset about it, he’s not going to throw him a pity parade. He makes a mental note to look into what happens to children without parents in the Fleet. Filling newly discovered holes in his knowledge is an ongoing effort, and it seems like he finds something new to learn every day recently.

“What’cha reading?” Mitch asks.

Gabriel’s screen is still floating in place, locked in where he left it. “Oh, Becca Adler #131, The Maze at World’s End.”

“I love Becca Adler! Are you reading them in order? Have you read… which one was it? Forty… five? I think? The one where she plays cards with Death while James and Andrew bring Princess Kathrine back to life, and she cheats, and he catches her-”

“But she convinces him that cheating is part of the fun of the game and then it’s a bloody free for all for four souls!” he continues.

“And she gets some insane godly intervention and wins the last hand, and he goes home empty handed and owes her a boon!” Mitch finishes.

“Is it… Was it godly intervention?” Gabriel asks.

“It’s implied.” Mitch says. “I don’t think they ever outright say, but I’m pretty sure they changed authors at like fifty-something and the gods stopped being really important.”

“New author at… God. #55, I think. I hadn’t noticed that the gods stop being so central to the plot, but you’re right. She didn’t have a prophetic dream for a good ten books, and there was no intervention for almost as long. How far have you gotten?”

“I’m stuck on #72. Twice as long, half as fast.” Mitch rolls his eyes. “I keep trying, but I can’t get through the castle. It’s so boring. Everyone says it’s important, but it just kinda sucks.”

“God. Skip it. That was that author’s last contracted book and they royally fucked it up,” Gabriel says. “Castle Titania comes up maybe twice after that and you can get most of it in from context. I can spoil the little bit you can’t, if you want to jump ahead to #73. It goes quick and is a lot more fun than endless feast scenes.”

“ _Please_ ,” Mitch begs.

“Alright. Becca has a distant blood connection to the royal family, just close enough to be on the family tree as writ by the gods. They keep it in the basement because there are a couple other undesirables on it, and the one in the grand hall is an altered replica. She finds out in secret at midnight from the senechal, and when she wakes up the next morning she’s a hundred miles away, in the wilds of Balthar, with no idea what happened in between. Read the last two or three chapters of Castle Titania and you’ll be caught up. The bit in the castle is a slog but the rest is fairly snappy, and then you can move on with the really good parts of the series.”

“Huh,” Mitch says. “Huh.” He’s still walking, staring straight ahead at nothing like he’s working out a mental puzzle. “That makes so much sense. Is that why Princess Kathrine was so weird around her?”

“No, that’s almost certainly because she was attracted to her,” Gabriel says.

“But they’re, like, cousins. Right?”

Gabriel shrugs. “Strictly by the genetics, more like an extremely distant aunt, and I don’t remember… exactly, but I don’t think there was any direct blood connection between the two of them, marriage only. They’re likely no more genetically related than you and I are. Don’t get me wrong, there are quite a few reasons why they can’t get together that become relevant in the later books, but familial relation isn’t one of them.”

“Like what?”

“Spoilers,” Gabriel says, and winks.

Mitch sputters. “I don’t care about spoilers!”

“I do, and I don’t give them out for free, not to just anyone, not without a really good reason.”

“I’ve been reading them since I was like twelve years old!” Mitch says.

Gabriel looks at him oddly. “And you’re only on #72?”

He opens his mouth to snap back, shuts it, and turns a ruddy pink. “Shut up,” he mutters. “I don’t read that fast.”

“That’s fair. You’re how old?” Gabriel asks.

“Just turned 20,” Mitch says, still embarrassed.

Gabriel does some quick math on his fingers. He’s still not great at division and has to work it out with his hands, not just in his head. “10 books a year isn’t a bad pace. That’s more than a lot of adults average. Little less than a book a month?”

Mitch makes a face. “Yeah, I guess. How long have you been a fan?”

“Only about a year, but I read absurdly fast and chew through about five books a week. I aim for two fiction and three or more nonfiction.”

“You’re kidding.”

“To be fair, I’ve had a lot of catching up to do. I didn’t learn how to read until I was 13, and wasn’t any good at it until I was almost 16.”

Now Mitch just looks confused, so Gabriel clarifies, “As you can probably tell by my unusual dialect and bizarre appearance, I’m not from around here.” He knows his clothing stands out, but Gabriel has never been comfortable with how tightly fleet jeans fit. He always feels like people can see every inch of his ass when he wears denim, and wraps aren’t appropriate for work, so he taught himself to sew and buys nice, comfortable linen or wool cloth when he needs new clothes. “Literacy wasn’t a universal right where I’m from, and no one bothered to sit me down and teach me as a child. I figured out the basics when I was a teenager. Then we moved here when I was 15 and suddenly people were extremely concerned about the fact that I couldn’t consistently spell my own name correctly. Crash course on reading and math and such for my entire family, and I reluctantly learned the basics. Eventually I figured out that books have information in them, not just stories and propaganda, and I’ve been racing to catch up ever since. People make fun of me significantly less now that I know things like what the moon is made of and what radiation is. My internship was… interesting.”

“You didn’t know about radiation?” Mitch asks, incredulous. “ _You didn’t know what the moon was?”_

“The moon was a heavenly body created by God Almighty to light our nights, so be grateful and stop asking so many damned questions, you rotten little bastard,” Gabriel says cheerfully. “Radiation was a terrible, unholy plague of the Godless heathens sent from above to burn their flesh and poison their land and water, so we must never leave the island or allow the unclean outsiders to pollute us.”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Mitch whispers, then claps a hand over his mouth. “Sorry,” he says through his fingers.

“No, that’s an appropriate reaction. Things were patently insane on the island, and I’m not sad to be done with it. Like I said, it was an exciting revelation to learn that books had anything except propaganda and nonsense in them. I’ve spent the last three years getting caught up with what normal people know, and have been getting into more interesting varieties of nonsense and propaganda in my free time.”

“Okay, but you know what the moon is now, right?”

“Why is that always so important to people?” Gabriel asks himself. “Yes, I’m aware of what the moon is, and I even know how it got there and who used to live on it. Bloody shame about the global space alliance. I think I’d have liked low earth orbit. It’s probably easier on the back than full gravity.” He stretches his shoulders back and pops his back in that disgustingly audible way he has a talent for.

“And you know about radiation and radioactive bacteria and rad storms and all that stuff, right?”

Gabriel laughs. “It’s very kind of you to worry about me, but yes. I’m quite aware of the dangers floating out of Detroit. ‘Well informed citizen’ is a work in progress, but I’ve been taught about safe swimming zones and what rain to avoid and such.”

“What else are you learning about now?” Mitch asks. “Five books a week, all the same stuff, or all different?”

“It really depends.” Gabriel’s screen is still up. He closes out of Becca Adler and goes back to his library screen. “All related right now. I’m actively working on Becca Adler #131 and _Dinosaurs and You_ , and I have another two dinosaur books queued up. I got to those from a book about mass extinction, a bit indirectly, when the librarian realized I had very little idea of what a dinosaur was. I thought they were pretend.” He shrugs. “Part of finding out what you don’t know is going down rabbit holes from fairly general to extremely specific information. _Dinosaurs and You_ is a general overview of extinct species, when they lived, what killed them off, how we found out about them, things like that. I’m only about a quarter of the way through it. It’s slow going.”

“Dense book?” Mitch asks.

“Mostly pictures, actually. It was written for children. I just keep finding things I have to look up, words and events and such, and then I’ll be on the internet for half an hour or so, learning the etymology of the word Cretaceous and more fun facts about the era, and how an era is defined, and all sorts of other interesting things, like how fossils form. They’re almost required to be buried in layers of mud or silt or something particulate in order to fossilize properly, and those don’t pile up on dry land very often, unless there’s been a volcanic eruption or a meteor strike or some such, so most of the extinct species we know about are aquatic.”

“Huh. That makes sense, actually.” He’s looking over Gabriel’s shoulder at the library screen and the expanded list of titles. “What’s _A Murder Most Fowl_ about?”

“A serial killer that kills customers in her restaurant, and then cuts them up and serves them as food. It’s disgusting, and I’m fairly certain nothing but an excuse to write down hundreds of puns. It was terrible! I really enjoyed it.”

“That sounds amazing. Does it come in audiobook?” Mitch opens a screen into an audio entertainment app and starts typing.

“Fowl with a W.”

“Wowl,” Mitch says without missing a beat, and Gabriel laughs.

“Exactly! That fleet education is working wonders for you!” Gabriel says as sincerely as he can manage. “A Murder Most Wowl.”

“A Wurder Wost Wowl.” Mitch shoots back, fighting to keep his laughter contained.

Gabriel makes a noise like a teakettle and has to hold onto the bar so he doesn’t fall. “You sound like my grandfather!”

“Missing teeth?” Mitch asks. “Wissing Weeth?”

“Most of them, yes!

“So dentists and literacy. What else didn’t your old home have?” Mitch asks.

“Electricity, for the most part. We had a few things that ran on batteries, but they may as well have been magic for all any of us understood them.”

“ _Wild_. I didn’t know there was anywhere left that doesn’t have electricity. So you didn’t grow up watching TV?”

“I didn’t know television existed until I came here. Scared the absolute hell out of me the first time I saw a screen floating with nothing holding it up.”

Mitch snorts. “No TV, no books, what did you do for fun growing up?”

“Not much, honestly. Worked. Hung out with friends. When we were really bored we would get three or four boys together and find someone to start a fight with,” Gabriel explains.

Mitch’s mouth twists like he’s trying to find something nice to say about teenage Gabriel’s idea of a good time and can’t. It’s the prosocial paradise. They don’t start fights here, not for no reason.

“Yeah, that hardly ever gets a laugh,” Gabriel admits.

“Why did you do it? What did you think was going to happen when you started a fight?” Mitch asks in that absurdly calm and reasonable security voice. What was the intended outcome? Are you sorry? Have you learned a valuable life lesson?

“We mostly did it because it was what you did when you were a bored teenager. It was what our older brothers did, and our friends, and half the time we were getting back at someone from when they mobbed us.”

“What did you do when it was your turn to get beat up?” Mitch asks, back to fully curious.

“Tried not to be a fun target, and hoped you didn’t get your teeth kicked in. By the time I left the island I could handle a three on one fight, see figure 1, bloody enormous, so I didn’t get attacked all that much anymore. I stopped going after people too. Just found better things to do with my time.”

“Well that’s- Hhhh, crap,” Mitch hisses suddenly and rolls off the back of the treadmill. He has one leg bent at an awkward angle and is gritting his teeth in pain.

“Cramp?” Gabriel guesses.

“Charlie horse.”

“Hold still a second.” Gabriel rolls off his treadmill too and grabs Mitch’s foot and knee. “This is going to hurt for a moment.” He bends Mitch’s leg straight and his foot flat.

“Shii-ooot.” Mitch starts to curse, then catches himself when the pain from having a cramp forcefully worked out disappears suddenly.

“Better?”

He tests his foot against the ground, then stomps a couple times to make sure. “Great! How’d you do that?”

“A medic taught me that trick when she found out how much I walked. It works about nine times out of ten. The tenth time it just hurts.”

“Nice,” Mitch says. “Well, _I_ for one have learned an important lesson today about walking nonstop for three miles. Now I think I’m gonna go lie down and cry.” He sounds cheerful about it, at least.

“Alright then. Have fun. If you collapse on the way there, try not to get trampled.” Gabriel gets back on his treadmill and reaches over to turn Mitch’s off for him.

“Will do! It was fun meeting you.”

“You too, Officer Mitch, security guard extraordinaire. I’ll do my best to remember you if I find myself in trouble.”

“See you around.” Mitch limps out of the gym dramatically, obviously playing it up. He’s walking normally again as soon as he’s out of the door, before it even swings shut behind him.

That’s one task Gabriel can check off his to do list. He’s managed to make a friend here.


	3. Chapter 3

“Can I get a second set of eyes on this?” Basil asks from across the room. “Something doesn’t add up here.”

Gabriel is an hour into his second short shift of the day, on his third day of work. He took an early three hours, was swamped with small fixes the entire time, then had a few hours free where he wasn’t allowed to use his implants at all. Now he’s settled in for the last three hours of his work day, late at night with Basil.

“Alright.” He leans around him to look at his screen, squinting in the low light. It takes five minutes of Gabriel leaning over Basil’s shoulder, looking at the slow scroll of numbers, to get even half an idea of what he’s looking at. It’s absolute nonsense. Some list of inputs and outputs, but the numbers repeat too much to make any sense. “What is this?”

“Production orders from a metal working ship, the _Hephaestus_. Everything is put in right, and it doesn’t come back wonky at a basic pass. Nothing’s wrong with the code, but their production floor today was crazy buggy and spit out all the wrong stuff. This looks weird, right? Why would they make _one_ angle bracket?” He points to an order for, there it is, a single angle bracket. Right below that is two T-brackets. That can’t possibly be right.

“They’re supposed to be making more on the order of dozens a day, if not hundreds, aren’t they?” Gabriel asks.

“Normally, yeah. It’s all automatically filed, though, no human eyes on it until something goes wrong. All the orders from other ships go into the same queue, and they’re supposed to be sorted by AI.”

“Who in the hot french fuck ordered _five_ screws?”

“No, that’s five screws total for the whole day, see?” Basil points out.

“ _Why?”_

“Because the program is spitting out nonsense numbers, and I can’t figure out why. Everything I put into it to test works, but they lost an entire day of production.”

“Wait.” Gabriel is starting to see a pattern. Too many values repeat here, and most of the values are _absurdly_ small. “No.”

“What?”

“This has to be a joke,” he says to himself.

“ _What?”_ Basil asks more emphatically.

“Search for a string of values for me. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. Just humor me.”

Basil types it in. “Eighteen matches.” Basil says blankly. _“Why in the hell is the fibonachi sequence in_ _here_ _eighteen times?”_

“Because this isn’t today’s bloody work order. It’s a first year techie debugging exercise.”

“It’s… what?”

“If it’s working, it’s the solved version, but this is one of the first simulations they give interns right now.”

“You’re joking,” Basil says. He looks at Gabriel, then back at the screen, at the eighteen iterations of a single string of numbers in what’s supposed to be the entire fleet’s metal work order for the day. “You’re not joking. Why the hell is this _here_?”

“My only guess is that someone fucked up and lost today’s order, and this was the best replacement they could come up with on short notice. If someone on the _Hephaestus_ isn’t panicking in circles right now I’ll eat my boots.”

“Okay, so all we have to do is figure out what they did with today’s form, get it back, and they’re just a day behind on orders. Simple enough. They can make that up tonight or tomorrow.” Basil says, already getting to work.

Gabriel settles back into his chair just in time for another ping from the low priority queue. That’s about all he’s doing right now, things that can be solved in an hour or less, that don’t require much in the way of processing work or creative problem solving. It’s boring work, but he’s honestly fine with it. Helping less technologically inclined people reset their passwords and recover lost files isn’t _bad_ work, just mundane and routine. Basic. Uncomplicated.

Never doing anything else ever again would be infuriating, but three days of it so far, and another month to look forward to, aren’t the end of the world. He’ll be back on the fun jobs soon enough. A short vacation, after everything that happened at the mall, is honestly a nice change of pace that Gabriel is determined to enjoy. The only alternative is complaining the entire time, and all that sounds like is a good way to make the couple weeks feel like an eternity.

* * *

An hour later Basil stretches up and back, cracking his spine, and levers himself up. “I need some tea. You want anything?”

“Green with honey, if it’s not any trouble,” Gabriel says with his thumb on the mute button. He has a tricky one. Someone lost an entire data cube, outright misplaced it, and needs two vital files from it before midnight. The files are probably somewhere in his ship’s data, but all he remembers about them is the date he moved them to the misplaced storage cube. “No, I _promise_ you, emptying your trash bin won’t help at all. Just go make a cup of tea or something and I’ll hunt them down. No, you have to leave your screen- Fuck. The stupid bastard hung up on me,” he tells Basil.

Basil snorts. “Good luck. See you in a minute.”

Gabriel calls him back and tries to keep a calm, professional voice while he explains that he can’t access his files with no connection to his implants, and that he, Adrian, his name is _Adrian_ and he doesn’t like Gabriel’s _tone_. Regardless, if he hangs up again he’s never getting those files back. And he does want the files back tonight, doesn’t he?

Basil gets back with their tea while Gabriel is arguing with him about whether or not Adrian deserves an apology for Gabriel’s _tone._

“Regardless of how you feel, I’ve done _nothing_ but try to help you find the files you lost. No, I will not apologize for stating a _fact_. No. You lost your damned files. I would very much like to help you get them back so we can both do our bloody jobs- He hung up on me again,” he tells Basil.

“Forget him.” Basil hands him a large tea. “If he needs help that bad he can get back in the queue.”

Gabriel raises a toast. “To Adrian. I hope you find your stupid data on your own, you malingering dipshit, and never darken the queues of my ship again.”

“Who’s Adrian?” Basil asks, sitting down with his own tea.

“A malingering dipshit who lost his data,” Gabriel explains.

“Never would’ve guessed that,” Basil drawls.

Gabriel snorts. Basil is turning out to be fun to share a late shift with. He may make this a regular thing. “How is the _Hephaestus_ doing?”

“Hard part’s done. I’m taking five before I do the paperwork part. Switching brains.”

“Should I be doing paperwork for my solves?” Gabriel asks.

“You’re doing the quick fixes, right? There’s a form you’re _supposed_ to fill out, takes about thirty seconds, but no one ever looks at them.” He shows Gabriel in his own screen where to find it and what he has to fill out. “One sentence description of the problem, time solved, and give it your thumbprint.”

“Easy as can be.” Gabriel fills out one for Adrian and his data cube, and notes that he declined help as politely as he’s able. He’s still a little steamed that someone wanted him to apologize for a basic statement of fact, but he keeps it to a single sentence and manages not to write anything except that the caller was antagonistic and unhelpful, then deletes the unhelpful part once he gets it out of his system. It takes the circle of metallic thread on his fingertip as a thumbprint without complaining, the way he set it to last year. Nice that that still works the way its supposed to, even after everything got hard reset.

Basil settles deeper into his chair, leaned back so his hips are right at the edge of the cushion and his back is curved almost in half. It doesn’t look comfortable to Gabriel, but Basil seems fine with it. He’s young and bendy. He sips his tea awkwardly, nearly horizontal, slurping it from the edge of the cup without tilting it more than a few degrees. “Hey, can I ask, what’s up with the gloves?”

“I’m missing three fingers. It’s not a secret. Some people just find them distracting, so I keep covered.” He peels off his left glove, the hand missing its first and middle finger, and shows Basil the little mechanical prosthesis he got for them when he moved to a place that could machine parts that finely. They’re black metal with grippy plastic fingertips that bend into a fist when he brings what’s left of his fingers in toward his palm. “They only do one thing, the one motion, but that’s all I need from them. It lets me type, and I can do anything else fairly well with just the stubs.” Gabriel shows off their range of motion, bending and stretching them so Basil can see how they work.

“Huh. Cool. You wanna see mine?”

“Sure.”

His work glove is hiding a prosthetic after all, and it’s a lot more advanced than Gabriel’s mechanical fingers. The clear polymer looks custom-made, it’s such a perfect match for his natural hand, and the wiring inside is one of the most elegantly designed things Gabriel has ever seen. He decides he’s taking a fifteen minute break right now, and spending every second of it examining this masterpiece of biomechanical engineering that’s fallen into his lap.

Basil explains the basics of how he did it, from the design phase through all of his prototypes, and how he finally landed on something that works well enough that he’s only poking at improvements in his free time, instead of setting aside time to work on it every chance he gets.

“You did this yourself?”

“Most of it. The base design was already floating around in theoretical forums. I turned it into a working prototype and improved it from there.” He sends Gabriel his schematics to look over later, in more detail, when he has some time to read every last design note. Just getting to touch it and see how it moves, Gabriel can see a lot of what went into it, how it was made and what Basil was thinking when he designed it.

“It’s open to the air, sort of. Pressure equalizes naturally. So I lost some structural integrity, and it gets contaminated sometimes, but I that’s only a problem when I go too long without cleaning it out. The rest of the time I have better than perfect fine motor control and sensory feedback, and that’s all I really need as a tech,” Basil finishes explaining.

“Have you considered fabricating an airtight skin with a little internal slack? I bet you could design it so pressure could still equalize, but you wouldn’t get gunk in it as often.”

Basil shrugs one shoulder. “Considered it, but it’s almost impossible to get time in a sterile lab unless you’re an engineer, and if there’s _any_ foreign material in my hand when I put the cover on, it’s gonna turn into a petri dish. Maybe someday, if I ever get bored of teching and go for my ISE certs, but for right now I just clean it when it gets gross and live with it.”

“Fair. God, I still can’t believe you designed this _yourself_. I don’t want to ask if you ever took the genius exams, because that’s damned personal, but...”

“Took ‘em. Passed. Never got the genius certification because I was fourteen and they don’t like to put that kind of pressure on kids, and I didn’t feel like going through the process again when I was old enough for it to matter.” He looks embarrassed about it, for some incomprehensible reason, flushed a ruddy pink across his cheeks. A certifiable genius at 14, and smart enough at 18 to not sign up for the added expectations. “What about you?”

“When I was 17 my director tricked me into taking it. I was still an intern, and he sent me the tests over a few days like they were just another assignment. I passed by the skin of my teeth. Solid scores on the math and problem solving portions, but my general knowledge score and written portion were bad enough that I had to go to an interview to determine what, exactly, the hell was wrong with my brain. I didn’t actually realize what was going on until more than halfway through the interview, so I’m probably not a true genius, so much as really good at tests.”

“Shit. Same. Geniuses don’t stick their hands in machinery until they know the machine is off,” Basil says, holding up his fake hand.

“I doubt they stick their fingers in automatic knife sharpeners, either.” Gabriel takes the opportunity to high five him with his worse hand.

“Really?”

“While it was sharpening a knife. I was ten,” Gabriel says.

“What about the other finger?” Basil asks.

“Ah. Well. I got caught stealing something, and they believed in corporal punishment on the island.”

“...Oh.” Basil says awkwardly, looking at Gabriel’s other hand. “Sorry. That really sucks.”

“It was a long time ago,” Gabriel gives him the usual response. It did suck, and it still sucks that he only has seven fingers, but that part of his life is over and there’s no way for him to go back.

“Yeah, alright,” Basil takes it for what it’s worth. He still looks a little troubled by the idea of cutting pieces off of someone as a punishment, but he’s kind enough not to comment on how barbaric Gabriel’s childhood was. He finishes his tea and puts his wrist brace and glove back on, covering everything worth taking more than a second glance at. Then he pulls his screen back up and starts his paperwork. Fifteen minutes off isn’t the end of the world, but they are still both at work.

Gabriel slips his gloves back on with a little wiggling. The canvas is tighter than Basil’s work glove and doesn’t slide on as quickly or easily. Out of sight, out of mind, and now they’re just two technicians with their own style, two idiot geniuses who learned to keep their hands to themselves the hard way. He pokes the queue, waiting for the next small problem to arrive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a fun chapter to write. As always, leave a kudos if you liked it and a comment if you have anything to say. Attention feeds the beast, and I'm starving.


	4. Chapter 4

Gabriel’s chiming implants wake him up from a dream about chasing down a goat. He nearly had it, too. He’d backed it into a corner between his fence and his Uncle Noah’s, and was a bare ten feet from grabbing it and dragging it back to its pen. The broken fence was already repaired and no one else had escaped, except for the one ornery little goat with a death wish and a taste for barbed wire.

“Mother-bitch,” he grunts, swiping at his screen. He rolls over and sits halfway up, blinking against sunlight.

“Gabriel?” A startled woman’s voice asks.

“Ah feck,” he mutters.

“Do you need a moment?” the therapist he definitely has a meeting with this morning recovers and asks, not unkindly.

“Just a one. Sorry!” God, he sounds fresh off the boat. Gabriel hasn’t spoken to another human being in that dialect in years, not on purpose anyway. It comes back when he’s drunk sometimes, but he tries not to get that drunk too often, and keeps how bizarre and uneducated he used to sound to himself.

He turns the screen so she’s facing the wall and can’t see him scrambling around naked, and gets dressed in record time. His pants from last night are still on the floor next to his bed, and he grabs a clean shirt from his drawers and zips it on. There’s not much he can do about his hair at this point, but he still makes an attempt, and gets it back in a low ponytail where at least it isn’t hanging in his face and sticking up everywhere.

While he’s putting himself together he mutters “experimental-socioeconomical-metallic-orientation,” under his breath to try to force himself back into the crisp, clear pronunciation of an advanced society. No more Mackinac Island English. He’s an educated citizen now, not some illiterate dumb ass with a rake.

He plasters a normal person smile on his face and pulls the screen back in front of him. There. Functional human being in two minutes flat, and his heart only has a little leftover racing palpitation from being woken up into a video call. “Sorry about that. Lost track of what day it was,” he explains.

“Does that happen a lot?” Miss Rachelle asks. She’s in charge of tracking his mental development and what changes week to week, between treatments and as he’s getting back to work and using his implants again. Of course she wants to know if he’s forgetting things like what day it is.

“Not… strictly. I knew today was Saturday, but I forgot I had a call this morning and snoozed through two alarms. Sorry. I do okay as long as I have a schedule to reference, but I do tend to lose track of what I’m supposed to be doing unless I have something to tell me.”

“Are you getting enough sleep?” she asks.

“Stayed up late watching a movie,” he admits. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking about what I had to do tomorrow… today, and didn’t get to sleep until almost three.”

“Would you call that a malfunction with your self control, or your forethought?” she asks.

“Mmm.” He has to think about it. She wants honesty out of him, and has been kind and patient enough that he doesn’t mind giving it, most of the time. “Self control, I think. I’ve been staying up late a lot without anyone to tell me to go to sleep, and there have been a few other things that I didn’t connect until now.”

“What happened?”

“Got mad and closed out of a shift early when I had two rude calls in a row. Sorry. I know. I _know_ I’m supposed to be more mindful than this, but it’s hard to keep that straight in my head when people are yelling at me because they forgot their own bloody passwords and have somehow gotten into their heads that it’s _my_ fault.”

“Gabriel, first of all, no one is mad at you. You don’t have to apologize,” she says, for about the thousandth time.

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

Miss Rachelle sighs, but quirks a small smile. “Second, you’re _going_ to have challenges at this point in treatment. That’s normal. It would be a sign that something is seriously wrong if you were suddenly perfect, halfway through nanotherapy. I’m here to help you find solutions to the unique, inevitable problems you’re _supposed_ to be facing as you get better. You deserve help, and it’s my job. So, you get angry on calls and can’t go to bed at a reasonable hour. Is that everything?”

“I can’t stop eating. I’m averaging five meals a day right now, sometimes more,” he says.

Miss Rachelle nods and pulls up a small screen with the outline of a human body and some tiny text on it. “As of your last checkup, you’re still a little underweight and malnourished. As long as you’re eating nutritious food and not just snacks and sugar, there’s nothing wrong with giving your body as much as it wants. Are your rations keeping up? We can adjust them if you need more to eat.”

“I’ve. Um. I’ve actually been trading my blocks for real food. Raw ingredients, for cooking,” Gabriel admits.

“...How?” she asks.

“Rations actually trade absurdly well on the fresh food market, especially if all you’re after is raw, base inedible, or perishable ingredients like flour, salt, raw meat, spices, things like that. I also have a handful of vendors who give me a really good deal because I’ve been going to them for years, regularly enough to be a dependable source of shelf stable protein. A few are a bit miffed at me, since I’ve been in the hospital and not giving them blocks, but they honored our deal after a little arguing,” Gabriel explains. He’s been cooking for himself for years, since he came to the fleet and discovered how gross blocks are. Good protein, but they taste like oily napkins and sadness.

“Your file mentioned you like to cook when you have the option,” Miss Rachelle says. “I’m glad you’re engaging with your hobbies again. What I meant was, how are you making the trades? Everything I have says you haven’t left the ship all week, and you didn’t stop anywhere between the _Nebuchadnezzar_ and the _Reliant_.”

“Would you believe there’s a secret underground… underwater? There’s a secret network of chefs, butchers, growers, and drivers, all trading their excess for luxuries,” Gabriel says. “It’s not cheap, but it’s pretty convenient and makes a lot of people fat, happy, and rich.”

Miss Rachelle thinks about it for a few seconds. “Good try, but too many moving parts. There’s no way to keep something like that a secret for long. Now for real, how are you making trades?”

“Hmm. True. Fun to think about though, how I would implement something like that and what might go on in such a wild and secretive sub-society. Might make a fun serial drama, if we could find good actors for it. Who do you think it should focus on, the drivers or the chefs?”

“I recognize you deflecting and changing the subject,” she says patiently.

“Sorry.”

“You’re allowed to have privacy and secrets, Gabriel. Just promise me you’re not doing anything illegal or dangerous, okay?”

“Promise. I’ve looked into the relevant laws and have been doing this to some degree or another for long enough that if I were going to get hurt, I would have done by now. I’ve got someone else acting as a go-between right now, so I don’t have to go anywhere personally. It’s all above board, and I’m not capitalizing on my vital resources, just turning a little excess into a personal luxury.”

“You _have_ done your research,” she seems impressed that he can quote the law that exactly. He doesn’t really understand the praise. It’s just repeating something he’s read, just using someone else’s words to make a point.

“I’m hardly a lawyer,” he says.

“Pretty good at talking around a point, though,” she points out.

Gabriel shrugs. It’s not his fault that no one else can keep on topic either. This sort of thing just happens when he talks to someone for too long. Conversations meander, and no one can keep them on track, least of all him.

“Let’s talk some more about your mental management toolbox, and what needs to change so you can work your hours and get enough sleep. Are sleep and work the only places you’re struggling, not counting being hungry?”

“More or less. Interpersonally I think I’ve done okay, and I’ve not felt the urge to go anywhere or do anything unusual.” Mostly he’s been exploring his ship, a little at a time. There’s a lot to see and do on a 200. Not as much as the mall or the _Washington_ , but it’s kept him busy for a week.

“In that case, I think treating the symptoms will be fine for now, and if it turns into a permanent problem we’ll find a more permanent solution when we know for sure,” Miss Rachelle says. “If you go into your data rings’ settings, you can turn on parental controls and the “lights out” feature. That’ll lock your data rings for anything except emergency functions between whatever hours you set for them. Most people choose the time they normally go to sleep to a couple hours before they usually wake up, so if they wake up early they aren’t stuck without their screens.”

“Alright. Easy enough. What do we do about work?”

“You have the option of working over text only, if that sounds less stressful, or you can change your work schedule to two hours, three times a day instead.”

Gabriel chews it over for a minute, considering his options. Those are two good options, which are actually four good options if he chooses both or neither. Four, and he might have other things he can do as well. Nothing is as simple as it seems, according to what he’s reading right now. _Deeper Into Physics_ is strange, but it makes some amazing points about how the real world thinks about the philosophy of science.

He still has to work six hours a day, four days a week, at a minimum, but he can change almost anything else. What else is there to change? “Can I set things so I can work from the gym? Walking helps me focus and stay calm.”

“We can definitely try it,” Miss Rachelle says cheerfully. “If you start to get complaints about being distracted at work we might need you to stop and try something else, but if you think you can multitask that well I don’t see why not.”

“Let’s start with that and I’ll keep you up to date in my mood journal,” Gabriel says.

“Sounds like a plan.”

They shake on it, bumping their knuckles against their screens.

“Next on the docket,” she announces. “How are you doing with the feelings of disconnect and,” she checks her notes, “the _floating_ feeling?”

“Having my own space has helped. Being able to go for a walk or go outside whenever I want and make my own schedule and things helped a lot. I only feel floaty right before bed and just when I wake up, now.”

“Do you feel it right now?” she asks.

“Not really. It’s mostly when I’m lying in bed trying to get my brain either into or out of gear so I can wake up or go to sleep. You woke me up and I kind of… I _didn’t_ have an anxiety attack, but it was a near thing.”

“Well, I’m sorry for almost giving you an anxiety attack. In the future, if you sleep through your alarm and don’t wake up for a call, we can reschedule for later in the day or another day, so it’s not the end of the world if you’re late or miss it. I just didn’t expect to see you naked.” She makes a couple notes in her file. “So being in control of yourself and your schedule and more regular exercise have both helped you feel more centered. That’s extremely good data. Thank you. Have you considered taking a structured movement class, like dance or martial arts?”

“Oh. No. No, thank you,” he says awkwardly. Gabriel is too tall and gangly to look any good dancing, and for all he’s good in a fight, he doesn’t enjoy hurting people enough to ever want to do it on purpose. His walks are enough exercise to keep him happy, have been for years. Nothing about that has changed.

She gives him kind of an odd expression, like she’s trying to read his mind through the screen and failing completely. That’s normal. He barely has a mind to read anymore and doesn’t know why he thinks most of the things he does either. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?” she asks.

“Not really.”

“Alright. I’ll let you get back to your day, or sleep if you want. I want to leave you with the thought that you _are_ going to get better, as long as you keep working at it. Recovery is closer every day,” Miss Rachelle says kindly. She says the same thing every week, that nothing going on right now is permanent and that she sees him improving every day. This is his fourth call like this, and it always seems to go roughly the same way. Problem, management, “you’re going to be okay, eventually.”

“Thank you,” Gabriel mumbles. It’s hard to believe, that he’s going to just be fine one day. The call ends and he stares at his blank screen for a while. Calls with his therapist always leave him feeling a little bit like a clock with the second hand stuck. The world keeps moving around him, and here he is, ticking in place, waiting to be fixed.

He needs to get up and do something, but nothing sounds right. He could go for a walk, if he felt like walking. He could sit on the sun deck, but it’s bound to be cold this early in the morning. He could get breakfast, or make breakfast, or eat some of his leftovers. He’d really like to make bread, to knead dough until his shoulders are burning and he feels like he’s done something worthwhile with his day, but he still has at least three days worth of good bread in the downstairs fridge, and having too much food, enough that any of it goes bad, feels wasteful to Gabriel.

He really should make breakfast, though. He’s hungry, he’s always hungry but it’s an insistent needright now, and it’s time enough for breakfast that he can get away with a large, simple meal that doesn’t take much thought. Lunch is usually leftovers and disappointing, or blocks. Dinner is a problem of having to get creative with what he has on hand. Breakfast has trended easy this week, and he feels up to easy this morning.

  
  


Phil is in the kitchen, the residential galley, when Gabriel finally makes it down to cook. He’s at the stove working on a chicken stock and some grilled fish. The fish is probably dinner. It’s nearly Phil’s bed time, late in the morning as it is. The stock looks nearly done, but Gabriel is struggling to think of what Phil can do with it in the next hour.

“Can I steal a burner?” he asks.

Phil moves to one side to give Gabriel half of the stove.

He gets a frying pan heating with some oil. “What’s the plan for the stock?”

“Freezing it,” Phil says. “I got my hands on a free chicken and didn’t want to waste the carcass. I’ve got this and chicken salad left, and I’ve been eating roast chicken for the last two days. If you have anything you want to try with it I wouldn’t mind giving some away.”

Probably from Belle, when he was shopping at the mall. She runs a chicken farm and sometimes gives Gabriel something free when he makes a large purchase, like this week when he needed a lot of everything she sold, chicken, eggs, honey, and the yeast she’s known for in the bread making community. It’s hard to get rid of an old, gamy hen in the fresh food market, so Belle sometimes unloads poultry she can’t sell on him when one of her chickens stops laying or gets too injured to be worth keeping.

“I might take some.”

“Whatcha making?” Phil asks.

“Just some eggs, bit of ham. Breakfast. You?”

“Rosemary grilled catfish. Your friend, that Anson guy, had some herb butter I’ve been playing with. Let me know when you need another mall run. You know some interesting folks.”

“I’m fine for now, thank you.” Getting to know the mall’s market, and finding people who appreciated a buyer who knew what went into making food, took some time and some talking, but it’s worth it to be a regular somewhere. He’s a little surprised Phil didn’t already know Anson, given how much he cooks, but if he mostly buys lakeside fresh food and works with that, or only goes to the mall for things that aren’t practical to grow on a boat, he wouldn’t have a chance to establish those connections.

They’re quiet for a moment. Phil flips his fish and bastes the other side with his rosemary butter. Gabriel watches his eggs. The stove is old and finicky, but it does a decent job as long as he keeps an eye on it and doesn’t leave it to burn.

“You need to talk about anything?” Phil asks awkwardly.

Gabriel shrugs. He knows he’s usually more talkative than this, usually has something to say about food and cooking at the very least, but he just feels out of words. Everything is looming around him and he doesn’t have the slightest clue what to do about it. “Have you ever woken up one day, and everything was different?”

“Kind of, yeah,” Phil says. “Dad and I moved to the fleet when I was eleven. Born in Chicago, and had already been working for a few years when mom died and we couldn’t afford rent in the city anymore, just the two of us making an honest living. It was either take a gamble with the gangs, or take a gamble on the Admiral’s crazy dream, and my dad picked the lake. I was a sweatshop aged kid back home, and then we got here and all of a sudden I wasn’t allowed to work at all. Not a real job, anyway, not for another three years.”

“What did you do?” Gabriel asks. He can’t imagine it. He’s been working since he was old enough to haul water, and had a full adult’s worth of farm duties by the time he was thirteen. As soon as he was up and moving again, in the fleet, he was shoved into an internship, and has been an IST ever since. Four months of bed rest while he was recovering was rough. Three years of nothing to do sounds like hell.

“Got a real education. Ran the houseboat as well as I could when I was four feet tall and dumb as a brick. It was weird all over, but I figured it out.” Phil knocks Gabriel lightlyon the head with his spatula. “You’re gonna figure it out too. You’ve got at least half a brain in there, somewhere.”

“Thank you for that terribly accurate assessment of my capabilities,” Gabriel says dryly, faking sarcasm. Phil makes some uncomfortably astute guesses about what’s going on with Gabriel, sometimes. Something is obviously wrong with him, and he knows it’s obvious, butthe comments about him having half a brain hit a little too close to home, and Gabriel can’t guess how he would know for sure unless Ben told him.

“Real advice, take it or leave it. You’re a week into a new job, new home, new everything. Give it at least a month before you give up. Your ham is burning.”

Gabriel swears and turns the burner off, pulls the pan off the stove, and waves it up and down to try to cool it down without losing anything. The eggs are fine, but the eggs are still barely half done. It’s a good thing slightly burnt ham tastes good, or Gabriel would have wasted half his breakfast.

  
  


“How are the quick fixes going?” Phil asks when they’ve sat and are eating. His fish turned out perfect, on the one good burner with him watching it, and Gabriel’s ham, eggs, and toast are good enough for a simple breakfast. It’s not the same ritual as a family meal, not even close to the one thing Gabriel misses about home, but it still feels nice to eat across a table from someone and not in a crowded cafeteria or alone in his room.

“Not terribly. The people I’m working with have trended dimmer than your average algae bulb, but I like the overall work and I like doing something useful with my time.”

Phil snorts. “That sounds like the small queue, alright. I can’t fucking wait to get you back on the big problems. We need more good techs. Sam’s a disaster.”

“Sam’s fourteen. Were you wise and skilled at fourteen years old?”

“Yes I _was_ , and there’s no one alive who can prove otherwise,” Phil snarks.

“Where did you do your internship, anyway?”

“Little ag processing ship called the _Raisin Hell._ She got decommissioned, fuck, thirty-something years ago? Got bounced around for a while and ended up here probably twenty-five ago. Yeah that sounds right. Twenty-seven years this June. Time flies when you’re having fun.”

Gabriel tries to imagine working somewhere for that long, watching the face of the ship change around him while he ages. Phil is in his sixties, and still works on a large ship. He’s outlived the average work residency of a fleet citizen by decades. Most people find someone to get a house boat with by his age.

That’s almost as hard to imagine as staying in one place for that long, the thought that some day he might settle down somewhere, in a job with a commute and people who want to live with him on purpose. He has no idea how to find people like that and he doubts he’s going to luck into people liking him here. Maybe he should talk to Miss Rachelle about it, see if there are any social skills modules he can do, and he can get into a healthy relationship once he has the slightest clue what that looks like.

Phil is staring at him across the table. “Welcome back, space cadet. How’s the stratosphere?” he says when Gabriel looks up from his breakfast again.

“Sorry.” Gabriel adds ‘stratosphere’ to the list of words he needs to look up.

“Don’t apologize if you don’t mean it,” he grumps.

Gabriel takes another bite of egg to stop himself from apologizing again. Phil won’t accept it, and all he’ll do is make himself look like an idiot. He’s really trying not to do that anymore, but it’s hard when he is at least half an idiot right now.

They eat in silence for another few minutes. Phil has a piece of Gabriel’s bread he’s using to mop up leftover rosemary butter, and Gabriel is almost done with his slightly too crispy ham. They’re going to have a bread class together soon, once Gabriel’s yeast culture is healthy enough to split again. A few more days, and then he’ll teach Phil to make his own bread without having to buy packets of yeast at the mall.

“Fuck I’m getting old,” Phil complains. He levers himself out of his chair and creaks up to standing.

“Do you need anything?”

“If you have a spare set of knees lying around I’ll take ‘em,” he says, stretching his legs. “Ugh. What time is it?”

“1100. I’ll do your dishes if you want to take care of the stock.” Phil has got to be exhausted. He’s been up since at least dusk, probably working hard the entire time. The sooner he can get to bed, the less grumpy he’ll be, and Gabriel bets he can get him there sooner.

“Fuck. If you don’t mind?”

“I wouldn’t offer if I did.”

Gabriel handles the sink full of dishes quickly and quietly while Phil strains, jars, and stacks the chicken stock in the freezer for later. It’s simple, hands-on work like he hardly gets to do anymore. There’s something soothing about transforming a sink full of mess into a neat row of clean dishes on the drying rack that settles the last of the quiet, circling anxiety in his head, and he feels better when it’s all done. He takes care of the soup pot once it’s free and hangs it up to dry where it won’t end up on the floor if the ship hits a swell. Then they wipe down the counters one last time and Phil scrubs dried butter off of the stove top.

“Alright. Good job, team. A+. Ass pats for everyone. I’m going to bed,” Phil rambles. He reaches up to clap Gabriel on the shoulder, then limps out of the galley.

Gabriel is going to be okay. He’ll figure it out.


	5. Chapter 5

Gabriel is in the corner, trying to settle himself, when something touches his shoulder blade and he flinches hard enough that his head bangs against the bulkhead.

“Are you okay?” Basil asks. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m fine,” Gabriel says automatically.

“Okay. Okay, but, like, you’re obviously not. How do I help? What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing,” he says stiffly. He would really, genuinely like Basil to stop touching his shoulder, but he has no good way to ask him to stop. He’s trying to help. He’s not, but he’s trying. “Just a small panic attack. I’ll be fine in a few minutes, an hour tops.”

“Okay, what helps when you have a panic attack?”

“Standing in the corner and being left alone,” Gabriel snaps. “Sorry. I’m sorry.” He picks the spot on his neck he’s been working at, trying to calm down. Basil doesn’t hate him. He has no reason to. They’re friendly, if not friends yet, and no one starts fights here anyway. He presses his shoulders in tighter to the corner and tries to shut everything else out, but it isn’t working.

“Hey, it’s _okay_. I just mean, like, Rich uses vodka to chill out when he has anxiety. Anton uses weed. Trimmer… I don’t think you’ve met Trimmer yet. He has pills that settle him down when he freaks out. Do you have anything like that?”

“Weed. Weed works pretty well. But I don’t have any right now.” And he can’t exactly go back to the mall to get more, the way things stand. He could probably track down a lake side supplier, but not while he’s having a panic attack and someone is _still touching him._ Life just has to be panic and pain for a while, and he’ll be fine in time for work tomorrow.

Basil finally stops touching him and starts doing something on his screen, messaging someone in the ship’s chatterbox. He’s sent a wall of text and is getting quick, blipping messages back. “Anton says we can come _partake_ with him, but only if we promise to be cool and not tell anyone,” Basil says.

“I can be cool,” Gabriel lies. Cool is beyond him at this point, and any point, but he can manage not to tell anyone. He’s made a tidy little living in the past out of keeping his mouth shut. Keeping a little weed quiet is the easiest thing in the world.

  
  


“Anxiety?” Anton asks. “Me too. C’mon in, sit anywhere.” He moves out of the doorway to let them into his berth. Anton has the space of someone who likes clutter and has lived somewhere long enough to nest in. His desk has maybe two square feet of usable space between the canisters, boxes, baskets, and stacks of stuff, and his walls are busy with a mishmash of landscapes and postcards from all over the world. But his floor and bed are both clean, his shelves show some kind of organization, and nothing smells or is visibly dirty.

Gabriel categorizes everything from the doorway, then takes a step inside and plants himself on the bed. He’s still shaken, and shaking, and it’s a fight not to find a corner where he doesn’t have to look at anything or think, or talk, or be a person. Basil sits next to him, just a little closer than is strictly comfortable, and puts his hand over Gabriel’s on the bed.

Anton drags his desk chair across the room, to the far end right between his bed and the door. “I can almost reach from the bed. I’m just about two inches too short.” He climbs up and balances on the arms of the chair while he unscrews the single screw holding the cover onto his ceiling vent. It pops free after a little working, and Anton rescues a little metal box from just past the first bend in the vent.

“I would give you a few inches if I could,” Gabriel offers. He’s too bloody tall, Anton is shorter than he probably wants. If only they could work something out. Someone somewhere out there in the big terrible world has probably figured out the modifications necessary to transfer height from one person to another, but bugger all if Gabriel has any idea how.

“I’d take eight inches if you were in the mood. Any more than that is just too much,” Anton says idly. He sticks the metal box to the wall – it’s magnetic. That’s clever. Probably stops it from falling into the vent and disappearing forever whenever the ship lurches – puts the vent cover back on, and climbs carefully down from the chair.

“What?” Gabriel asks. He looks at Basil to see if he understands, because Gabriel is lost at sea.

Basil is biting his lips like he’s trying not to laugh.

“Y’know? Don’t worry about it. Have you tried weed before?” Anton’s voice is light, like he’s trying with all his might not to make Gabriel uncomfortable. Too late. Gabriel is always uncomfortable, and right now in particular he feels half a step from screaming and ripping himself apart. He’s going to feel better soon, though.

“I’ve never made a habit of it, but I’m not unfamiliar.”

“Basil?”

“Once. I got way too high and had a bad time. You remember my batch of interns’ graduation party?”

“Parts of it!” Anton says cheerfully. “We’ll start you off with a little bit and see how you do. Gabriel? What’s your tolerance like?”

“...Borderline nonexistent,” he admits. “I’m on some other medication that makes anything else I use significantly stronger. So I get drunk for cheap, but I can’t handle much in the way of recreationals.”

“Anything you feel like sharing? Getting drunk for cheap doesn’t sound bad.”

“Not unless you’re interested in a 65% chance of developing a debilitating neurodivergence. My meds don’t treat neurotypicals kindly. Sorry.”

“Hard pass,” he says. “You and Basil can split a nug, and I’ll take it easy so I can babysit you if you freak out. Any flavor preferences? You caught me on a good day. I have kind of a lot of weed right now.”

“Weed comes in _flavors_?” Basil asks.

“Yup!”

“Kind of,” Gabriel adds.

“Mostly it tastes like weed, but good pot, if you’re used to it, sometimes has really subtle flavors that people have spliced or bred into different strains,” Anton explains. “My weed guy is working on some spicy stuff right now that’s really choice. Geoff is cool. You’d probably like him.”

“I usually go for sweet or fruity strains,” Gabriel says. “Special preference for strawberry, if you have it.”

“As it _just so happens,”_ Anton fishes two buds out of the box and holds them up. They look beautifully plump and fresh, and have a slight pinkish sheen when they catch the light. He breaks the smaller one in half with his thumbnail and passes Basil and Gabriel each a piece. “Chew, don’t swallow,” he tells Basil.

“I know what I’m doing,” Basil sulks, and tucks his bud into his cheek to chew.

It’s good weed, not the highest quality Gabriel has ever had, but extremely fresh and juicy, like it was put into stasis seconds after being picked and never had time to dry out. There’s just enough strawberry flavor to be interesting, but it’s not overpowering or chemical at all. Geoff, whoever he is, knows what he’s doing.

“The mall usually got dried, from Chicago,” he says when he’s been chewing for a minute and has gotten a good bit of juice out of his nugget. Gabriel can feel himself relaxing by degrees. His head feels lighter and less like it’s been crushed in a vice, and the panic snapping up and down his nervous system has settled into a tingling in his palms that makes tapping his fingers feel even better than normal.

“Isn’t Chicago weed supposed to be, like, crazy strong?” Anton asks.

“That’s what they say, but I think it’s propaganda,” Gabriel says. “I’ve never noticed that much of a difference. It’s bloody _full_ of pollutants, though. A woman in maintenance got lead poisoning from a bad batch once, years ago. Granted, legend goes she ate the entire batch herself in less than a month.

“Jesus. Was she okay?” Anton asks.

“No idea. It was a borderline urban legend by the time it got to me. I think you do get a little higher with the dried stuff, but that’s just because it breaks apart in your mouth and you swallow more bits by accident.”

“That sounds disgusting,” Basil says. He doesn’t look like he’s enjoying the layered and complex taste of good weed. His mouth is twisted to one side, and he keeps grimacing and wrinkling his nose up in cycles.

“You can stop if you don’t like it,” Anton says.

“’m fine,” he says. “I wanna get high with you guys. Don’t wanna leave Gabriel alone.”

“That’s… that’s so kind,” Gabriel says. It’s absolutely the weed, but he feels like he’s going to cry. “Can I hug you?”

“Yeah. Yeah I… Yeah.” Basil says, going pink. It’s so cute. He’s so cute. Gabriel needs to hug him immediately.

It’s extraordinarily awkward to hug someone who’s sitting on the same bed as you. The problem is compounded by both of them being tall, gangly boys with too much leg and not enough padding. Basil has a little softness, but Gabriel is still uncomfortably lean and wiry. They manage a hug, though, figure it out between a pair of geniuses, and it’s only a little bit uncomfortable to hold the position for more than a minute.

“Can I have a hug?” Anton asks.

“You can _absolutely_ have a hug.” Gabriel says. He hasn’t had much physical contact in the last week and a half, not since he left the hospital and stopped having touch therapy twice a week. It was the most awkward thing he’s ever done, having prescribed cuddling with a borderline stranger every three days, for an entire hour at a time, but he supposes it’s better than developing a new neurosis from not having a kind touch for months on end.

Anton is small, soft, and wonderful to hug. His hair does get into Gabriel’s mouth, though, when a little weed juice escapes and he licks his lips so he doesn’t drool. A single hair attaches to his tongue and finds its way into his mouth, and he has to pull the entire thing slowly through his mouth to get it out without loosing valuable weed.

“My hair’s clean. I washed it _maybe_ two hours ago,” Anton says when he has his hair back.

“I’m fine. I’ve had significantly worse in my mouth. I’m just glad I didn’t swallow it. I’ve swallowed my own hair a couple times when it was down, and nearly threw up getting it back out.” That might be to much information, but neither of them looks disgusted or like they’re ready to kick him out.

“How long is your hair?” Basil asks. He reaches out to touch the braided crown around Gabriel’s head and traces down to where the excess is bundled at the nape of his neck.

“Waist length, maybe a little longer.”

“Can we see?” Anton asks.

Gabriel pulls the couple pins holding his hair in place out and lets his braid fall down his back, almost to his hips.

“Oh wow,” Basil says softly. “It’s so soft.” He’s still feeling it, right where the braid starts on the back of his head.

Anton reaches up and digs a hand into his hair. “Huh. What shampoo do you use?”

“I… don’t? I just wash my hair with water.”

“I need to start doing that,” Anton says. “This is really nice.”

“Yeah,” Gabriel mumbles. People touching his hair is always really nice, especially when he’s stoned, or fresh out of a panic attack, or both, like today. When Anton doesn’t stop after a few seconds, Gabriel lies down in his lap to give him better access, and to relax on something soft. He’s so soft, and Basil is so nice, and today doesn’t suck half as much as it did half an hour ago.

“Are you feeling any better?” Basil asks after a few minutes of silence and everyone with their hands on each other. Basil has been idly tracing the side seam of Gabriel’s pants with his fingertips, from hip to thigh. It feels nice. Just nice to be touched by people who don’t hate him or want anything from him in particular.

“Mmm. Much.”

“Is anyone else hungry? I’m _super_ hungry,” Anton says.

“ _Oh my god yes,”_ Basil says.

“Do you feel like sushi? There’s a place that does the _best_ sushi, crazy fresh. They make it themselves and it’s _huge_ and send it in a stasis box so it’s, like, _fresh-_ fresh _,_ and they do drinks too. Like good drinks.” Anton rambles.

“Super Sushi?” Gabriel asks. “I love Super Sushi. Is that where you got the little stasis box?” He used to order from them on the mall, when he was stuck working and couldn’t take an hour and a half for a lunch break. He thought the weed box looked familiar. In theory you’re supposed to give them back, though.

“Yeah but _shhhhh_. I stole it and they never charged me for it.” Anton tries to put his hand on Gabriel’s mouth to shut him up, but Gabriel bites his fingers just hard enough to hurt, and he yanks his hand back again and wipes the spit on Gabriel’s hair. “Gross. You’re gross. Do you want sushi?”

“I,” Gabriel intones, “Am going to eat so much sushi.” He reaches up to hold Anton’s lovely soft face. “And I’m going to buy you so much sushi. Because you got me high. And Basil. Basil, how much sushi do you want?”

“Um, thanks, but it’s okay man. We can get our own sushi. Super Sushi is kind of expensive, and I know you aren’t working that much right now,” Anton says.

“No, no, see I have murder money that I have to spend, and-”

“Hold up. _Murder_ money?” Anton cuts him off.

“Did you… You didn’t kill anyone, did you?” Basil asks, voice small, not touching Gabriel anymore. That’s a tragedy. It’s a bigger tragedy than the murder money, honestly.

Gabriel twists around in their laps to look at Basil’s poor, nervous face. “No, no, I got murdered, see?”

“Uh. No?” Basil says.

“ _Unsuccessfully_. Attempted murder. And then I woke up in the hospital and the fleet gave me a ton of money.”

“...What?” Anton asks.

“Why?” Basil adds.

Gabriel shrugs expansively. He has no idea why anything happens, except that god is cruel and capricious and hates him in particular. That’s the only sensible explanation for his entire life that he’s been able to find, and it keeps making more sense the more that happens to him.

“Okay, sure,” Anton says to himself. “I can roll with it. Murder money. Sure. Let’s get some sushi. Are we still getting sushi?”

“We are going to get so much sushi. Here. _Here_.” He cheats and uses his implants to find the order form. Data rings are clumsy, and it’s his day off anyway. He can bake his brain for ten minutes on his rest day, if he’s getting sushi out of it when he’s starving. Being hungry is worse for his brain than a little extra heat, he’s sure. He gets a huge, beautiful platter of sashimi and sends the form to Basil to pick out what he wants.

Basil chooses a small feast of hand rolls and sends the form back, then asks “Can I get up? I have to pee.”

Gabriel falls in a controlled manner off of the two of their laps and to the ground in a heap. “Go pee,” he says, face down on the floor, and sends the form to Anton.

Anton gets the same sashimi platter as Gabriel and they argue a little over how much to tip. “Ten percent for the restaurant, five for the driver?” Gabriel asks.

“Opposite. Driver is doing all the hard work.”

“Driving isn’t hard, just time consuming.”

“And all the restaurant is doing is slicing fish!” Anton argues.

“You know what? You know what! Ten percent for both,” Gabriel decides.

“Sure. Murder money can give a huge tip to two people. Why not? It’s not like you have anything better to do with it.”

Basil calls Anton as soon as Gabriel places the order. “Hey guys. Guess who wants to hang out?” he says awkwardly. There, in the corner of his screen, is Mitch, off duty and smiling like he knows something. Basil looks panicked and extremely stoned.

“Uh. Tell him he can’t come in. We’re...”

“Naked,” Gabriel supplies from the floor, and has to bite his hand so he doesn’t laugh.

“Yeah, we’re naked.”

“I can see you right now, and you’re definitely not naked,” Mitch says.

“Is the call public?” Anton asks.

“Is it?” Basil asks, and looks down at Mitch.

“Motherfucker,” Anton mutters. “Uh. We’re having a private feelings jam and-”

“I already know you guys are high. It’s fine, don’t care, not my problem. As long as you’re sober again by your next shift I’m not going to ding you for anything worse than misappropriation of snacks,” Mitch jokes.

Gabriel worms his way back into Anton’s lap, sitting on the floor with just the top half of his head showing on screen. “Oh good. Misappropriation of snacks is, what,”

“A felony!” Mitch quips.

“Fantastic! I’ve always wanted to go to snack jail.”

“There’s a special cell in the brig for it.”

“Oh lovely! Will you be joining us? We’re getting quite a bit too much sushi delivered,” Gabriel says.

“You guys got sushi?”

Anton lets them in again and Gabriel gets the odd experience of seeing someone on and just behind a screen at once. It’s a little bit dizzying, seeing the doubles move just a fraction of a second apart, until Anton hangs up and there’s just Mitch and Basil. Basil has his arm around Mitch’s shoulders, and Mitch is hanging onto Basil’s waist. Something in Gabriel’s chest moves uncomfortably at the sight, but he belches and it goes away.

“Nice.” Mitch sits behind Gabriel, in the spot Anton just vacated. Basil sits directly in Mitch’s lap, gets laughingly shoved off, and drapes his legs over the two of them. One goes over Gabriel’s shoulder. The other makes a nice pillow when Gabriel leans his head back in Mitch’s lap.

“So what were you guys talking about?” Mitch asks.

“Murder!” Anton says from his chair. He’s eyeing the dumb knot they’ve gotten themselves into like he’s debating between joining or making them knock it off before he sees something sensitive. Basil and Mitch are both wearing wraps. Gabriel has his off-duty pants on, the worn soft ones that are a little thin in a couple places.

“Who are we murdering?”

“No one, I just have murder money,” Gabriel explains. “We’re spending it on sushi.”

“Like. All of it?” Mitch asks, dumbstruck.

“No like… a little bit. Like...” he counts on his fingers, doing math. He doesn’t need exact amounts, so the nearest round number works well enough. “About a percent? About one percent?” he tries. Both sound wrong for different reasons. “An percent? No, that’s terrible.”

“One percent, grammatically,” Basil says. “And also, what? How much money do you get for being murdered?”

“ _Attempted_ murdered,” Gabriel corrects him.

“The remuneration payout is kind of a huge deal,” Mitch explains. “It’s for when the legal system _totally_ fails a citizen and they need a fresh start. Most people take the money in New York silver or California nortons and catch the next boat to anywhere else. You took yours in Fleet credits?” he asks Gabriel.

Gabriel shrugs. “I don’t know where else I would go.”

“Yeah. That’s fair. One person who wants you dead here versus everything the rest of the world has to offer? I’d take here too, especially if they got deported.”

“I _think_ they did. I… sort of haven’t been paying attention to it. There’s so much else going on I haven’t had time for it.”

“I can check for you if you want. I need the person’s name and maybe their ID number too, if you know it.” Mitch offers.

Gabriel sighs. “I would really just like to forget about it, honestly. I’m fine, they’re… whatever. If I can just continue being fine and they can continue being whatever, within our different spheres of influence on different ships on this bloody enormous lake, I can be happy.”

Mitch puts a hand on his head in a kind of “there there” pat, then leaves it there when he’s done. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Me too.”

  
  


The sushi arrives while they’re talking about the worst crimes the _Reliant_ has ever seen. Mitch was involved in a case between two mechanics and some stolen beer neither of them was supposed to have in the first place, that ended up getting dropped so neither of them would get a black mark for possession of stolen goods or drunk on duty. Then it turns into a discussion about the weed Anton totally doesn’t have hidden somewhere in his room, and whether Mitch is doing him a favor by not reporting it, or just saving himself paperwork.

“Thing is, it’s never affected your or anyone else’s work,” Mitch says. “We haven’t had one in a while, but drunk mechanics make more drunk mechanics, and then you end up with either half a shift calling out at once, or a couple of drunk-on-duties causing problems together.”

“I don’t make a habit of giving out free weed,” Anton says. “Not that I have weed. Purely hypothetical.”

“Right. Purely hypothetically, you don’t cause bad habits,” Mitch agrees.

Gabriel gets the message that his driver is there and waiting for him around when Mitch is making some uncomfortably good guesses about where the weed is hidden and excuses himself to go pick it up. The fresh air and short walk feel nice, even if he is getting to the dizzy and uncoordinated part of being high. He could stop where he is and be comfortable for a few hours, and anxiety free at least for the rest of the day.

Gabriel Farmer, IST: what should I do with my weed. Do you double-chew?

Anton Dubois, IST: Nasty. Just spit it in the composter if you’re done.

When the LnchBx driver is gone Gabriel spits the well chewed wad of weed into the lake and stumbles back down to Anton’s berth with his stack of stasis boxes. They’re clearly labeled with paper tape and easy enough to pass around to the right people, even though he’s pretty fuzzy on things like who ordered what and whether or not they got the right order at all, and then they end up eating out of each other’s boxes anyway.

Gabriel didn’t realize his would have so much salmon in it, and raw salmon makes his stomach hurt if he eats more than one or two pieces at a time, but all of it disappears when he’s not paying attention. Anton doesn’t really like octopus, so Gabriel and Basil are kind enough to liberate him of his tentacles. Mitch unabashedly steals everything he can get away with, and then takes the rest of Basil’s hand rolls when Basil curls up and falls asleep, stoned and stuffed, with his head on Mitch’s thigh.

“You guys are _so_ cute,” Gabriel says with his mouth full. He misses the mall for a moment, misses not falling asleep alone, and is very briefly jealous of the two of them and how comfortable they are with the physical affection that Gabriel hasn’t been getting much of, or any of, recently.

“They’re not together,” Anton says.

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty fuckin’.”

“Yeah,” Mitch says. “Friends, but that’s it.”

“Huh,” Gabriel says. That’s… interesting. He’d thought Basil had a sort of poly thing going on with Mitch and Rich, but if he doesn’t, if this is just how he treats his friends, “huh.” He’s having a hard time getting this thought to sit straight in his head. There’s still a lot of weed in his system and he’s only getting higher the longer it stays in his stomach.

“You okay?” Mitch asks.

“Bluh,” Gabriel says. “Stoned. Little too stoned.” He leans against Mitch’s shoulder and drops his head onto the top of his. “Carry me.”

“Where are we going?” Mitch asks.

“Hold me,” he corrects.

“Nap time?”

It wasn’t until he mentioned it, but now that it’s on the table, a nap sounds perfect. Panic attacks, even short ones that get resolved quickly, always leave Gabriel shaken and exhausted. He needs to sleep at some point today, and right now sounds like the best plan he’s heard in weeks.

The pile of them collapses backward onto the bed. Gabriel is lying with his head on Mitch’s shoulder, and Basil shifts around enough to use Mitch’s stomach as a pillow and Anton’s wall as a footrest. Anton joins them, bullying Gabriel far enough onto Mitch to curl up under his arm and settle between him and the wall, with one short leg thrown across the mass of them.

It’s not comfortable, honestly. In any other state of mind, Gabriel would be restless and aching in minutes. Too high too think and stuffed full of good food, though, he’s just comfortable enough to make up for how his legs are twisted at an awkward angle and Anton’s head is directly on his bad shoulder. He falls asleep after a few minutes of listening to Mitch and Basil mumble little nothings at each other and Anton grumble back and turn out the lights.

“G’night,” he mumbles. “Love you all.”

“Love you too,” Gabriel hears before he’s out.


	6. Chapter 6

Gabriel comes back into focus slowly. He’s still in the hospital room on the _Nebuchadnezzar_ , hasn’t moved while he was out of it or wandered off. There’s a ringing in his ears and he’s having a hard time focusing on things with both eyes.

Dumb. Think, idiot. He focuses on Bee with his left eye and lets the right one do what it does. That works significantly better and he finally notices how worried she is, and how she’s holding his hands achingly tight, and that she’s talking to him.

“Are you there? Focus, Gabriel,” she says slowly. She’s holding a tissue to his thumb where there’s a bright white line of pain. His needle is still in his other hand and there’s blood on the thread. He shakes his head a little, trying to get the buzzing to settle.

“Gabe, can you hear me? Answer me, honey.”

“What happened?” he mumbles. His tongue is uncomfortably thick and heavy, and the connection to his brain feels more like a call and response with a malfunctioning radio than the clear, electric flow of thoughts he’s used to.

“You had a blip and sewed through your thumb. Are you back now? Can you understand me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I’m back.”

She’s still holding his hand bruising-tight. Her small, hard hands are cold around his, but strong and steady. “Did you remember something else?”

“Maybe. Alex. Alexander Caliston, from my department. He was one of the people who grabbed me. “Alex, you fucker, get his neck,” and then someone got me in a headlock. I passed out. He… did he choke me out?” he asks, trying to make it all make sense. He never saw who, specifically, grabbed him from behind. Gabriel already knows which two crewmates were holding his arms and which one had his legs in a hold while he tried to get free and run, but that’s as much as he can remember about that day.

Bee takes her hands back and types the new memory into the file she’s keeping for him. Gabriel doesn’t know where these stories go or who sees them. He tells her what he remembers and she takes care of it, or she says she does. There’s no telling what happens to Alex after this, if anything, or the other five people who cornered him alone when he was sick and confused, already flirting with brain damage.

“Anything else?” she asks.

Gabriel shakes his head and pulls his knees up. His sewing falls to one side, off his cot and to the floor. He can pick it up later, if he wants to keep going, but if he stitched through his thumb when he wasn’t aware of himself, that might not be the best idea.

He hates talking about everything, hates remembering. They tell him that everything is going to come back eventually, once he has the rest of his brain back, and he’s genuinely considering not finishing treatment and just having brain damage for the rest of his life so he never has to know for certain what happened to him. He knows. Gabriel has seen all the photos, listened to or read transcripts of all the interviews from the couple people on the mall who were- who he thought were on his side, until everything went wrong, but it feels like it happened to someone else and he got the leftover damage to deal with. The photographs don’t look much like him. You can’t see a lot of his face in the before surgery photos, and he’s dirty and disheveled enough that he could be almost anyone.

Gabriel doesn’t remember days and days of starving in the dark and wet. He doesn’t remember weeks on end of deep process work, of turning the mall inside out and no one being able to cut his connection and stop him breaking her. He doesn’t remember going crazy, even.

Storm sirens in August. The hospital in September. A few blips before that, and one or two moments in between, but that’s all he has since he stopped taking his medication, and it’s honestly more than he wants.

Bee is holding his hands again. He has his own tissue managed, and it feels like the bleeding has nearly stopped anyway. All she’s doing is offering stability and support while he puts his head on straight, or as close as he can get anymore.

“How are things on the Washington?” Gabriel asks. Things go faster when he has something to do, someone to talk to.

“Hello, left field,” she laughs.

“Sorry.”

“It’s alright. Things are going okay, little hectic. You’d think these wise and experienced adults would be able to handle basic everyday tasks without an eighteen year old holding their hands, but nooooo,” she complains. “Goes to show. That’s probably what gave mom her second ulcer.”

“I still can’t believe she’s gone,” Gabriel says quietly.

“It’s been a year, honey.”

“I know. She just always seemed… I don’t know. Permanent.”

Bee looks at something else. “She didn’t have a ton of time left anyway.” It sounds like she’s practiced saying it. That was her mom, her _clone_ , the woman who raised her to be every incredible thing she ended up being. “We were lucky to have her for as long as we did.”

“Do you need a hug?”

“I’m okay.”

“Do you _want_ a hug?” he offers.

Bee sighs. “Come here you stupid cabbage.” She climbs into bed with him and wraps around him like an octopus. Her head is on his shoulder, his arms settle around her middle, and for a second it’s like they’re fifteen again, like he’s a weird foreigner and she’s ten pounds of curiosity in a five pound sack, and both of them are starving for a friend who has no idea who they are or what it means for them.

Gabriel had called her a pug-ugly reprobate the first time she came to visit the poor, injured refugees who washed up in her fleet, she poked her thumb _directly_ into the barely stitched up hole in his shoulder in retaliation, and they’ve been friends ever since.

“You still there, honey?” Bee asks when he hasn’t moved in a couple seconds. She stays perched in his lap and tugs on his ponytail like a bell pull. “Fleet to Gabriel. Come in, Gabriel.”

“Things are getting weird again. Talk to me?”

She unwinds from around him and sits in his knees while she tells him about the mall’s cleanup progress. The _Medusa_ took over last week. She and the _Reliant_ are taking it in turns, trading off monthly who unfucks his damage and who deals with the entire rest of the fleet’s systems needs. It might be done before Gabriel ever looks at it, or he might have a chance to see what, exactly, he did to the poor mall.

“You never realize how much goes into an AI until you have to rebuild one from scratch,” she complains. “She’s functional again, kind of, but everything takes four times as long and fucks up constantly. Like did you know there are two distinct plumbing systems?”

“Yeah. One for the permanent residents, one for the visitors,” Gabriel says. He hasn’t thought about that in ages, not since last March when he wanted to know why the water in the mess hall tasted more filtered than the water from the curry pop-up on the top deck.

“Yeah, well residential is serving everyone right now. We need to completely replace the other one. A ton of pipes got backed up and burst. We’re thinking about stringing the entire system together so there’s only one to worry about.”

“Huh,” Gabriel says dully. “Wonder whose fault that was.”

“I for one blame Alex Caliston,” Bee snarks. “Today, anyway. Next week we might have someone new to hold responsible.”

He snorts. Of course she does. Of course Gabriel isn’t responsible for what he did when he was out of his mind, or for being out of his mind, or for anything after July.

Pressure is building in his head again, just in his temples. He works his jaw up and down, trying to get something to pop and release.

“Headache?” Bee asks.

“Yeah.” It’s the normal kind, not the dangerous sparking kind, so he just has to deal with it and wait for it to either go away or get bad enough that he needs real help. Bee is here to push the emergency button for him if he passes out or has a seizure or something, but for now he’s fine. It’s just pain. Pain is normal in nanotherapy.

She scruffles her hands through his hair and rubs the soft spots behind his ears and at the nape of his neck. Gabriel holds onto her elbows for something steady and real to ground himself to. It’s okay. This is normal, and it’ll be over in a couple hours.

Another month of this, four more sessions, given things go as well as they have been and his scans come back clean. Then he’s done forever, or until his wires overgrow again. They won’t, probably. Most people never even need a trim. Gabriel just spent months on end on his implants and didn’t notice when they started taking over more and more of his brain. Then at some point, Gabriel wasn’t giving his own input anymore, and the mall was using what was left of his brain to break her own processes.

“Hey,” Gabriel says.

“Hay is for horses.”

“Is it possible for an AI to be suicidal?”

Bee makes a face. “It’s not supposed to be. You can build a system to destroy itself after a certain amount of time, or if it gets the right command, but calling it suicide is giving the machine way too much agency.”

Gabriel nods to himself and the pressure drains all at once. The pain building in his temples trickles down behind his eyes and out of his nose. “Ohh, that felt different.” He holds the tissue against his nose for a second and comes away with a dab of blood that he isn’t sure came from his thumb.

“Good? Bad?”

“ _Both,”_ he groans.

“Ewwww,” she laughs.

He gets a detached memory of his own hands, they look like his hands but he doesn’t feel any ownership of them, tapping on a dim screen floating in darkness. Red warning lights flickering to life, infecting blue lights one by one across a tangled network of lines. Then he blinks and the memory is gone. “Any idea how long it’ll take to repair the plumbing?”

“Should be done in a month, maybe a little more. The women on the _Medusa_ do good work. Your boys won’t have much to fix by the time they’re done.”

“Mm.” That’s a lot to think about, that he might never touch the mall again and she’ll just be fine forever without him. She loved him. He thought she did anyway, when he was out of his mind and she wanted to break.

Gabriel shifts and puts his arm back around her waist, moving her gently to one leg so he can fold the other under him. His knees are getting stiff. “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“For taking time off to sit with me. I know you’re busy and supposed to be doing other things.”

“Are you implying that I can’t do whatever I fucking want?” she swears.

“I didn’t-”

“Because it sounds to _me_ like you’re implying the _god damned Admiral_ of the _entire-ass fleet_ isn’t allowed to do whatever she _fucking_ wants on her rest day,” she hisses under her breath, mock furious and trying to yell and whisper at the same time

“I didn’t know you got rest days.”

“Why wouldn’t I get a rest day?” she asks quizzically.

Gabriel shrugs. “My father caught a lot of flack for taking the second half of Sunday off most weeks, and most of the leadership positions on the island were seven day a week jobs. Holidays off, unless there was an emergency, but we didn’t have many of those. Holidays, I mean. Fresh emergency nearly every day, it seemed.”

“ _Weird_. What was the burnout culture like?”

“We didn’t call it burnout, really. People just died sometimes, and someone else took the position after the appropriate time to grieve. It was terribly sad, but that was life.”

“...Like...”

“Suicide,” he supplies. “We didn’t call it that, obviously, because no respectable god-fearing man or woman would ever stoop so low, but now that I’ve had some time to think on it, it was obvious.”

“Mmf.” She looks troubled by the idea. They don’t do that here, not the same way. It’s still available as a last resort when someone is sick and in pain, at the end of their life or if they spend too long in a radiation field or something, and there’s no way for them to get better with modern medicine. That’s an entirely different situation though, and it’s a heart-breaking, dignified, and comfortable end to a full life, not an overworked, exhausted person whose only way out is a rope and a chair.

They have health care here, and rest days, and medication when nothing else works. People have options, dozens of them, and if all else truly fails there are painless ways to medically end a life that don’t involve going out to the barn and hoping no one finds you before it’s too late.

“The longer I know you, the more relieved I am you’re here and not there.” Bee still looks distressed by the idea that Gabriel might have killed himself if he didn’t end up somewhere better.

“Oh, I wouldn’t have taken my own life. An angry mob almost definitely would have gotten me first,” he jokes.

“Gabe…”

“And… I would have fought them off and swum to somewhere civilized?” he tries.

She snorts, socks him in the arm, and leans on him. “You’d better, you dork. I would miss you.”

“Question.”

“Answer.”

“Do you have the same job in this hypothetical?”

Bee thinks for a moment. “No. Mom lives forever and we run away to Hawaii. The end. Roll credits.”

“Starring: two idiots!” Gabriel says, holding his hands up like “ta-da.”

“Two? _Two_? Try _hundreds_ of idiots involved in this comedy of errors. Not to mention a few dozen assorted dipshits and dinguses, and exactly one moron.”

“Who’s the moron?” Gabriel asks.

“Alexander Caliston,” she chirps.

Gabriel sticks his tongue out at her. “Why do I hang out with you again?” he asks, mock serious.

“Because you don’t have any other friends?”

“I have friends!”

“Friends who have never tried to kill you,” she corrects.

“Okay, I have _two_ other friends. Maybe three, depending on your opinion on how likely too much weed is to kill me. Let the record stand that I have not perjured myself and a plurality of friendship.”

“That one kinda got lost,” Bee says.

“Yeah. How long do I have to go?”

“Focus, honey.”

When Gabriel looks down at Bee she looks troubled and tense, and there’s a medic holding his other hand, looking at a readout from a diagnostic tab. “Okay?”

She sighs. “Okay. Only about ten minutes. You blipped again.”

“Mm.” His head doesn’t feel staticky or weird, but if he went away for ten entire minutes, that’s not good. “So how long do I have?”

The medic answers for her, “We ended therapy for today. We’re going to wait for an hour, and if you’re okay for the entire hour, you get to go home. If not, you stay under observation tonight and-”

“I know how it works,” Gabriel says tiredly. “I have done this before, once or twice.”

“Have you done it when you were flying home after?” Bee snarks

“Rude.”

“You want me to give you a ride home, hon?” she offers.

“I’ll be okay. I know you need to get back to the _Washington_ eventually. Lots to do, and no one else who can do it.”

“It’s my rest day,” she reminds him.

“I knew that, actually. That doesn’t mean you have nothing to do today.” Gabriel says, talking around it.

“Yeah, like what?”

“Like when’s the last time you cleaned your room?”

She points at him seriously. “My room is clean. Enough. I cleaned it top to bottom two weeks ago, and I’m the only one who sees it anyway.”

“Clean your room, dorkus,” Gabriel says and gives her a noogie.

“I’ll clean _your_ room,” she says, elbowing him right in the kidney. Her elbows are tiny and razor sharp, and she has deadly aim.

“Oof.” He adjusts her to a spot where she can’t kill him with a well aimed jab. “What a kind and thoughtful offer from my very best friend.” His puppet voice is slightly strained as he’s trying to restrain her while she twists and wrestles her way out of his grip. “Should I take her up on it? My room could use a good cleaning. Do you think it would be a _good_ cleaning? Let’s ask our friends… at… home.”

It’s not easy to wrestle on a hospital cot, and both of them end up falling to the floor in something of a heap. The medic half-catches Gabriel, and Bee has already found her feet by the time Gabriel has figured out which limbs go where. Feet under him, both of them, and he can use the medic to keep himself upright and not hit the tile headfirst. He helps him up and gives him the “this poor brain damaged idiot” face.

“You know you’re not supposed to roughhouse while you’re in therapy. What if you hit your head?” he asks.

“She started it,” Gabriel says.

The “poor idiot” look intensifies. “Even if that’s true, you _both_ have a responsibility to treat your bodies and your brains with care and respect. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir,” Gabriel grumbles.

“Do you need someone to stay with you and keep an eye on you?”

“No sir. Bee is plenty.”

“I’m sure she is. Miss? Please be gentle with Gabriel. He’s in a delicate position right now and needs our care and consideration, not rough handling,” the medic says gently.

The doctor on duty knows who Bee is, but none of the medics have been told, and she’s almost unrecognizable with her hair down, in basic technician greys, without the hat. She has an alternate identity she uses to go out and hang out with people sometimes, a full set IDs that show her as Celibee Brown, IST.

“I’m sorry, medic. I’ll be careful with him from now on,” Bee promises.

“You can call me Marcus,” he says.

“I’m Bee.”

“It’s so nice to meet you,” Marcus says, holding Bee’s hand in a sort of handshake for a lot longer than is just polite.

Gabriel coughs and Marcus straightens up suddenly. “Right. Keep an eye on him, and call us if anything else happens.”

“Thank you, Medic Marcus,” she says sweetly.

“He likes you,” Gabriel teases when Marcus is gone and the door is shut.

“Of course he likes me. I’m an extremely likable person. Have you fucking met me?” she snarks.

“Once, maybe twice. I don’t see it, honestly.”

“In _other_ news, have you found any hotties on the _Reliant_? My reports say it’s a pretty welcoming place, if you catch my drift. Good fishing for the experienced angler.”

“I’m not exactly an experienced angler,” Gabriel mutters, going red. He would really like to not talk about this.

“Don’t sell yourself short! You did a lot of it on the mall.”

Oh god, she knows about that. “Everything you heard was false,” he says a little too quickly.

“Really?” her eyebrows go up. “So you didn’t have an eighteen person polycule and a couple partners outside that?”

“Absolutely false. Nothing true about it at all. And I was only involved with three, maybe four of them, personally. The rest were none of my business.”

Bee laughs at him a little unkindly. “You hopeless cabbage. Chill out and tell me about the boys on the _Reliant_. I’ll stop teasing you if you give me something juicy.”

Gabriel has nothing _juicy_ from his first week and a half aboard the _Reliant_ , but he knows his department well enough to tell her who he likes and dislikes so far. There’s a lot to say about Basil and his hand. Gabriel spends longer on him than the rest of the department combined.

“And the wiring is entirely custom, all the way through. The schematics from the prototype, I need to send you those later, don’t let me forget, didn’t work at all and he had to basically redesign his own nervous system, top to bottom. Or elbow to finger, I suppose,” Gabriel gushes. “Do you know how many nerve endings are in hands? There are so bloody many, and every single one of his work as designed. Better than the natural design, even. He can feel things down to the _micrometer_. It’s _incredible_.”

“Basil Wright, huh?” Bee pulls up his crew file and looks through it while Gabriel talks. There’s a lot there. Got special permission to intern a year and change early, special permission to end his internship at fifteen when it was obvious he didn’t need any more training. Been doing award winning work for six years now and kept his record clean for all of it. There’s a note that he’s from a creche, the _Kwan Yin_ , that Bee pauses on. “Huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m just surprised how much good shit he’s done, considering where he started,” she explains. “Makes me wonder what he’d be doing right now if he’d had a stable home life growing up, is all.”

“Who fucking knows?” Gabriel snaps. _Would’ve could’ve_ is his least favorite game, and trying to imagine how anyone’s life might be different if they had grown up normal doesn’t interest him.

Bee pats his arm to settle him. “So do you like this boy, or is he just a friend?”

“I dunno. He’s sweet, but he’s also seen me have a panic attack, and who knows what he thinks of me.”

“have you considered using your words and asking him?” she asks like a puppet.

“Use your words ne ne ne,” he mocks. “Is everything so simple on your ship?”

“It _is,”_ she says. “And you are welcome to join me on the _Talk About Your Feelings You Dingus_ if you feel like it.”

“So you want to know about my _feelings_?”

“Yes, actually,” she snips. “That’s why I asked.”

“Well too damn bad, because I don’t know what they are either. I don’t _not_ like him, but I don’t know if he likes me, or if he’s involved with anyone else. I thought he was, but that turned out to just be how he treats his friends, so who can fucking guess what these bloody neurotypicals are getting up to on this stupid ship.”

Bee laughs into her hand while he rants. “Usually we talk about it like adults,” she says. “Communication is key.”

“Is there a song to go with that one?” he asks snidely. He hates the bloody puppets. What they represent is fine, net positive even, and playing puppet when he needs to make a point works wonderfully, but they remind him a horrible amount of the early morning sing-along on the colony’s local radio station and he can’t stand them. He grew out of that by the time he was eight, and it was the only thing playing for the first hour and a half he was awake, eating breakfast and doing chores with nothing to do or listen to except the same two dozen children’s songs, over and over, for years.

“There _is_!” She sings. “Do you want to learn it?”

“I most sincerely do not.”

“Too bad! _Communication is a vital social aaaaart! And everybody has to do their paaaaaart!”_

“I hate you _so much_ ,” Gabriel complains. “You are a _curse_ upon my household.”

She sings over him, teaching him the value of communication in a horrible, off-key song. Bee can’t sing to save her life, and all the dumb ear worms she knows by heart don’t make up for anything. The chorus gets stuck in his head, too, and stays there through check-out and the entire flight home. He’s going to die with it stuck in his head, he’s certain. Beatrice Clearwater is a _curse_.


	7. Mitch

“Serious question,” James asks Rich. “What are you smoking and can I have some?”

“Uh.” Rich says, looking up from his cards. “What?”

Mitch, Rich, and Basil are playing a few rounds of Spellcraft in the lounge with James and Gabriel. James and Gabriel are technically on shift and supposed to be working, but it’s a slow night or something and both have been poking at personal projects and calling out bad advice for each hand for the last half hour.

In spite of being Basil’s best friend pretty much forever, Mitch still doesn’t understand a lot of what goes into IST work. He sees the results of the big projects, and Basil has explained how Intelligent Systems work about a billion times, but the day to day doesn’t make a ton of sense to him. Things go wrong with hardware and it’s up to the software guys to fix it. Something is lost in translation on Mitch’s end, but it’s enough work to keep nine crew members and an intern busy, so something is obviously getting done.

“Just looked up the metrics from that job we did earlier. How did it take you _two hours_ to isolate the problem to repeat ID numbers? Two deck hoppers show up to the same job eight times in two days and you don’t think to see what they have in common?”

Rich rolls his eyes. “Man, lay off. I didn’t sleep last night.”

“ _Yeah_ you didn’t,” Basil says suggestively, and they high-five.

“Gross.”

“Jealous,” Basil says.

Gabriel is looking at the same screen James has open. “I don’t see what the issue is. He found two other problems with the deck hopper order program in the two hours he was looking. Just because they weren’t the bug that was currently exploding...” Gabriel shrugs. “It was a remarkably competent fix. Just not fast.”

“ _Thank you,”_ Rich says emphatically. “Finally, someone who appreciates me.”

“I appreciate you,” Basil says.

“Yeah, but you’ve never called me ‘remarkably competent” before. Gabriel obviously loves me more. Maybe I should date him instead.”

“Oh, no thank you,” Gabriel says politely. “Remarkable competence is lovely, but it’s not on my hot list.”

“Oh well. Looks like you’re stuck with me,” Rich says to Basil.

“Darn. My loss,” Basil says with a laugh.

“Why are we listening to a _middle-man_ anyway?” James cuts back in, directed at Gabriel. “It’s not like any of his fixes are _competent_ , or even useful.”

The good mood evaporates. Basil stops laughing. Rich’s shoulders go tight and tense. Mitch puts his cards down and gets ready to intervene if Gabriel takes it personally or tries to make things physical. He has a couple black marks on his record. Nothing recent, but old habits die hard, and Mitch doesn’t want him to get another one over a stupid insult that isn’t even true. Gabriel wouldn’t be here if he didn’t pull his weight.

All he does is scroll to the next page in his book and say, “I don’t think I know what that is,” in a blankly polite tone.

“You should,” James sneers. “You _are_ one, you spineless, brainless waste of credits. A malfunctioning AI could do your job better than you.”

“Hmm. That seems a terribly unkind thing to say to someone,” Gabriel comments like a side character on _Family Fleet_.

James gets up and stands over Gabriel, blocking him from leaving. He snorts and folds his arms aggressively, knees touching Gabriel’s, leaned forward like he’s trying to goad him into trying something. Gabriel is a lot bigger, and a _lot_ more solid than soft, skinny James, and he would get in a ton of trouble if he threw the first punch. Given how close James is to him, he can’t get up without at least pushing him over, either. “Whatcha gonna do about it?”

He doesn’t look like he wants to start anything, though. Gabriel is sitting calmly, still absorbed in his book. Mitch watches him, waiting for a sign that he’s going to do anything. His eyes have stopped moving across the text, but he’s not rising to the challenge or even looking at James. “I’m terribly sorry, James. I didn’t realize that me being bad at my job upset you so deeply. Is there anything I can do to make up for it?” He tilts his head like a confused dog and locks eyes with Mitch on the other side of James. Mitch nods. He sees. He’s got this. “Give you some credits, maybe?”

Mitch chimes in before James can say anything. There’s probably still time to goof their way out of this. Gabriel is keeping things disruptively polite. Mitch can follow his lead. “Actually, under the Fleet Code of Conduct Section 18-3-2, a citizen can’t offer another citizen money unless exchanged at fair market value for goods or services,” he chirps.

“Hmm. Is a protection racket a good or service? Because I think James wants me to pay him to stop bullying me.”

“I don’t want your _fucking_ money,” James snaps.

“Good! That’s illegal under 18-3-8,” Mitch says.

“And I’m not _bullying_ you,” James says defensively. “What are you, _five_?”

“Oh!” Gabriel says brightly. “You’re attempting to give me _constructive criticism!_ With all due respect, your technique could use some refinement. Have you ever heard of the sandwich method?”

“What the _hell_ are you talking about now?”

“First, you say something nice, then you give your constructive criticism, then something nice again. For example: you have a perfectly symmetrical face. You’re _terrible_ at constructive criticism. You are an extremely punctual worker. Now you try!”

Basil snickers into his hand and Rich lightly backhands his arm. Okay, this has gotten funny again. Mitch relaxes half a degree, still ready, but not coiled to jump in and put himself between them.

James leans aggressively into Gabriel’s space. “One: you suck. Two: you _suck_. Three: You suck so hard I’m amazed you still have _teeth_ ,” he snarls.

Gabriel pouts comically. “Hmm. No, that wasn’t very good at all. Would you like to try again?” he asks.

“I think he was trying to comment on your… well… interpersonal skills, i-r-t _sucking_.” Mitch calls from the peanut gallery. This can still be funny. Gabriel is the unknown here, and he seems to be committed to making ita joke. The rest of them can back him up, team up on James, and stop him before he tries anything serious.

Basil snickers and kicks his calf. “What do you know about _sucking_ , muffin?”

It’s like cheap decktop theater, watching Gabriel visibly brighten back into puppet technicolor. “Oh, well then, yes! In that case, he’s absolutely correct, though I’ve no idea how he got that information.”

The back of James’ neck turns dark, angry red and his right hand tightens into a fist. Mitch gets one foot under him, toes braced against the floor, ready to jump into action. They’re only a couple meters apart. He can neutralize James before he punches anyone, easy, and then no one has to get hurt.

“Am I finally worth it?” Gabriel asks so quietly Mitch isn’t sure he heard him right. What does he mean, ‘finally?’

James punches the arm of the chair once, hard. “You’re not worth the fucking time I waste talking to you, you _freak_ ,” he sneers. Then he turns on his heel and stomps out.

Everything is quiet for a few beats. The door slams shut. Rich shifts in place. Then Gabriel takes a long, shuddering breath and folds over in half with his arms around his stomach.

Mitch is next to him before he makes the conscious decision to move. “Are you hurt?” He didn’t see anything connect. Did he miss something? How could he? He was watching the entire time. There’s no blood or physical mark that he can see, but Gabriel is having some kind of serious reaction.

“He has panic attacks,” Basil says from Gabriel’s other side. “Can I touch you?” he asks him gently.

Gabriel nods, but still twitches, not quite a flinch, when Basil rubs a hand back and forth across his shoulders. “Sorry,” he mutters. “Sorry. I’m okay. Just. Just a little leftover tension. I’ll be fine in a moment.” He sits up with his elbows on his knees and his head down, breathing deeply in and out in a practiced pattern. Basil keeps rubbing his shoulders. Mitch doesn’t know what to do with his hands or how to help, if Gabriel flinches when people touch him and they’re barely friends. He ends up with one hand on the arm of the chair, not touching, but close.

“That was really well done,” Mitch says. “Sorry I didn’t, like, jump in.”

“No. No, that was roughly what I hoped you might do. He’s not usually that- that aggressive.”

“Has he done that before?” Mitch asks.

“He tries to start shit every couple of days. Normally we shut him down pretty fast,” Basil explains. “I can’t believe he called you that.”

“Yeah. That wasn’t okay,” Mitch adds.

A few more deep breaths. They’re getting steadily slower and less shaky. “I, um. I still don’t know what that means. What’s a… minute-man?”

Basil’s mouth twists into an unhappy line, so Mitch takes over so he doesn’t have to say it. It’s not a comfortable topic, and his sweet Parsley is sensitive. “Middle-man. It’s someone whose job only exists because the system they work in is inefficient or broken, and if the system gets fixed, they get fired. You’re _not_ one. I don’t really know what you do, sorry, but you’re crazy smart and I know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t do a good job. And to be fair, I don’t really get what any of you do.”

“You know he’s a certified genius?” Basil says.

“Barely,” Gabriel adds.

“Don’t you have to get, like, a 90 percent to get those certs?” Mitch asks. He and Basil have talked about it before, and argued about whether it’s worth the time to get tested again. The prestige is incredible and it’s basically a fast-pass into any engineering program he wants, but if he doesn’t pass he wastes an entire day of testing for nothing, and he doesn’t get another chance for a long time, maybe ever.

“95. I got a 94.8 on the written test and did well enough in the interview that they gave it to me anyway,” Gabriel says.

“That explains it,” Mitch snaps his fingers dramatically.

“What?”

“James got his idiot certification last year. No wonder he’s jealous.”

Gabriel giggles and sits up a little straighter, shoulders more relaxed where Basil is still rubbing them, idly back and forth. “Really now? Is that something you have to test for, or do they just give it to you for performance in the field?”

“You have to do years of dedicated field work to get it. There was a whole award ceremony and everything!” Mitch jokes.

“Well now _I’m_ jealous. I’ve been an idiot my entire life and no one ever threw _me_ a parade for it.”

“You’re not dumb,” Mitch wants to shut that kind of joke down before it gets any traction. Gabriel is having a hard enough day without depreciating himself. And he’s a literal certified genius, too. Even if it’s just barely, that’s still an entire different mental weight class from most people.

“He stuck his hand in a knife sharpener,” Basil says.

“And I have the missing fingers to prove it.”

“Oh my _god.”_ Mitch crows.

“What?”

“You guys are _twins.”_

That startles a real laugh out of Gabriel and the last of the tension dissipates. He settles back into his chair more comfortably and opens his work screen again. “Thank you for all of this. Truly.”

“No worries,” Mitch says. “We’re here if you need help.”

Rich has been watching them take care of him and calm him down, looking thoughtful. Mitch appreciates that he let them take care of it and didn’t try to crowd him or loom. He doesn’t do it on purpose, but Rich is not a small man, and him hovering sometimes sends the wrong message. “Hey, we’ll make sure you’re never alone with James. Alright?” he says from the floor where he hasn’t moved.

“That… that sounds lovely. Thank you.”

“No problem. No one deserves his bullshit,” he says seriously.

“No, they don’t,” Mitch agrees for Gabriel’s benefit. He looks like he wants to take blame, or say that it’s not that bad, standard bullying victim stuff, but they don’t do that here and he needs to know that. Learn and internalize.

Gabriel’s mouth tightens into a thin line, but he nods, agreeing for now, at least.

“Are we still playing?” Rich asks. The cards ended up kind of everywhere, so they’re going to have to start over if they keep going. That’s not the end of the world, though. They weren’t playing for anything, and no one was really winning the last game anyway.

“Yeah. Just a second,” Mitch says. He wants to suggest a note for James’ file. This bullying stuff has gone way too far. Gabriel reacted well and stayed calm, but it looked like James was trying to start a real fight, not just bug someone. This is turning into a pattern, and it needs to be disrupted before it gets worse.


	8. Gabriel

Gabriel steps into the residential galley and has to pause to catch his breath. His entire department is here. Ben is here. The fourteen year old who takes every opportunity to call him weird is here for the bread class that was supposed to just be Gabriel and Phil, but word spreads fast when there’s a chance to learn something new, and now he’s going to be teaching _everyone_ , he supposes.

“Is this it?” Gabriel asks, swallowing down nerves. At least James skipped it. It’s still going to be awkward as hell with nine of them crammed into the tiny space, but he won’t have to deal with being bitched at on top of everything.

“Mitch is coming in a few minutes,” Basil says. “Something about paperwork.”

“The bane of security’s existence, or so I’m told,” Gabriel agrees. “Alright. So. I’ve never taught a class before. Where do we start? Ingredients? Science?”

“Ingredients,” Phil says. “Good a place as any.”

“Easy enough. Bread in general requires a carbohydrate, water, salt, and usually a rising agent to turn out right. Beyond that, you can add more or less anything you want and still get some form of bread, as long as it doesn’t interfere with anything already in it.” He gets ingredients for a basic loaf down from the cupboards and starts measuring flour into two bowls, narrating ratios as he goes. This will go significantly easier in teams, and they can bake in two batches of small loaves.

“Okay, who doesn’t want to play with yeast?” he asks when he has flour, water, and salt measured out.

Rich, Ben, and Nate all raise their hands.

“Sorry,” Rich says. “It’s just. Slimy. No thanks.”

“Fair enough,” Gabriel says. Rich has seen his yeast culture before and heard her glop around when he was feeding her and getting her more sunlight. As clean as Rich keeps things it’s not a surprise that he doesn’t want to touch a living culture.

“Really?” Phil asks Ben.

“It’s alive and I don’t know where it keeps its brain,” Ben says.

“It’s _bacteria_ ,” Phil grumps.

“And you want me to _eat_ it?”

“Actually,” Gabriel cuts in before it can turn into a fight, “I need a few people to use baking powder. I don’t have enough yeast culture for that much bread, all at once.”

“In that case, can I do baking powder too?” Anton asks.

“Absolutely.”

“I didn’t want you to think I’m a coward, but Susan is super gross and I don’t want to eat her either.”

“Very fair.” It’s not, really. Susan is exactly what a healthy living yeast culture should be, but Gabriel doesn’t want to fight about it. “Alright, two teams. Yeast and baking powder. We’re using slightly different recipes for both.”

Gabriel helps the baking powder team measure ingredients while the yeast team works on mixing, or tries to. Gabriel didn’t think of mixing dough together as a difficult challenge, but they’re like toddlers with a new toy, coming at it from every incorrect angle at once, one after another as they pass the mixing bowl around.

“Mitch, over here,” Gabriel says, making room at the table for him. The yeast team has taken over the counter space, and he’s finally arrived, out of uniform and looking strained.

He finds a spot next to Gabriel’s elbow and tries a smile. “Did I miss anything?”

“Nothing vital. I’m sending the recipe around when we’re done, on the off chance anyone wants to try this again. Ben is afraid of bacteria.”

“You get an infection somewhere without antibiotics and see how you feel about it,” Ben grumps.

Phil snorts audibly from the other side of the room.

“He’s not wrong, you know. I nearly lost a foot to a bit of rusty barbed wire when I was a kid. Still have the scar,” Gabriel says.

“ _Thank you,”_ Ben says. “Finally someone with common sense.”

“Now, take turns mixing this, and try to keep everything in the bowl.” He leaves them alone and checks on the yeast team. Phil has finally put together a working method where he holds the bowl and everyone else stirs it together with spoons.

If it works, it works.

“Alright, looks good and mixed. Now, has everyone washed their hands?”

A quick queue forms at the sink when they realize they get to _touch_ the dough and play with it, not just mix it around. They line up much more neatly than anyone at the mall has ever managed to, and hands get washed and dried without any trash talking or shoving each other out of line. It’s a nice change of pace to have a department that likes each other, for the most part, and doesn’t sabotage each other whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Gabriel gets his gloves and fingers put in the drawer where he keeps them when he’s cooking, rinses the little bit of sweat off his hands, and holds them up for everyone to see. “Yes, I am missing three fingers. No, it doesn’t still hurt. Accident with a knife sharpener when I was ten. Any other questions?”

“Why did you stick both hands in a knife sharpener?” Sam asks.

“Because I was an extraordinarily stupid child. Next question.”

“Did it cut them off cleanly?”

“Absolutely mangled them, and broke the knife in the process. The sharpener survived.”

Basil rubs his bad arm, looking distressed.

“Now, let’s learn how to knead bread. Basil, I’ll show you how to do it with one hand in just a moment. Everyone else, grab some dough and a bit of counter space.”

Most of them figure it out pretty quickly. It takes an extra second for Basil to master folding and turning his dough one-handed, but he gets it after Gabriel slows down and guides him through the motion an extra couple times.

Phil is a natural. Ben reluctantly does a decent job. Rich really doesn’t want to touch wet dough at first, but finally grits his teeth and sets in with a will that surprises Gabriel. None of them have to do this. Most of them are enjoying it with the manic glee of young men who don’t usually get to play with slimy things, so it’s interesting to see who doesn’t share that particular part of the male experience.

Mitch is the wildcard that Gabriel has been concerned about, but he turned out… fine. He’s quiet, minding his dough like it’s the only thing in his world. He has the technique down well enough for someone making their first loaf and is kneading like a champion, ignoring the chaos of a busy department around him and not looking up until Rich almost elbows him over when he switches hands suddenly.

“Alright,” Gabriel claps once. “Baking powder team, your loaves are ready for the oven. Yeast team, yours needs to rest and rise, then we’ll bake them. Do something to mark your bread as your own and fit them on the pan.”

He shows them how to score the tops of the loaves so they can tell them apart, then puts them in the oven to bake.

“I had some questions, while we wait,” Nate says, hand raised like he’s in a school room.

“Alright. What was on your mind?” Gabriel has studied bread enough to answer just about anything, from the science to the history of the art, and if he doesn’t know something, he knows where to find it.

“What’s a hereditary theological oligarchy?” Nate asks curiously. “I looked up the words separately, but, uh, how does that work?”

Of course. That. “It’s, ah, rather complicated,” Gabriel deflects.

“We’ve got like an hour before the bread is done, right?”

“Mm. Right,” Gabriel says. He doesn’t have a whole lot of a way out of this, unless he wants them to think significantly worse than the truth of how he grew up. It wasn’t horrific, especially compared to certain parts of the world, but they have no way of knowing that unless he explains it. He chews on the corner of his mouth for a minute, trying to figure out where to start. “Do you know anything about social stratification?”

“Like… capitalism?” Sam asks.

“Capitalism tends to cause it, yes. We were socialist, sort of, but certain people, certain families, got first pick of our limited resources, and others made due with what was left. Things were separated along family lines, hence the ‘hereditary’ part of things, and the family you were born into determined your social status, usually until you died. Sometimes you could marry up or down, but for the most part you were born, lived, and died on the same level.”

“Were you, like, important?” Basil asks.

“Damn near the bottom, actually. My family were farmers, manual laborers. Pretty much the only thing we got first pick of was food, and then only because we took more than we were supposed to during harvests.”

“You stole food?” Rich asks.

“It was that or go hungry, so yes. It’s not like we were the ones causing the shortages for other people. The only other option was starving ourselves so a few families at the top could get even fatter.”

“That’s really fucked up. Why didn’t you leave?” Nate asks.

“The fleet does some fucked up things. Why don’t you leave?” Gabriel tries to make a point.

“Because there’s literally nowhere in the world better than here?” Nate counters like it’s obvious.

“Serious answer, a mixture of propaganda and indoctrination. We were almost completely shut off from the rest of the world and had a bad habit of shooting anyone who tried to contact us. We were god’s chosen few, and the godless heathen outsiders were all murderers and worse who sought the destruction of man in god’s image. It was all supremely messed up and backwards, but when your choices are between the clean, safe island where you’re fed and clothed, and the radioactive wasteland where people kill each other over new shoes, you choose what makes sense.”

“Yeah. Okay,” Nate says. “I guess.”

“Are you still religious?” Anton asks curiously.

“Not particularly,” Gabriel shrugs. “God has fucked my life up in too many ways for me to be particularly grateful. It’s complicated.”

“So you would have lived and died on a farm?” Ben asks.

“More or less.”

“What a fucking waste.”

“No one gave a damn about my brain, beyond thinking I was a smart-ass who couldn’t mind his manners. Beyond that, what the hell was an illiterate farm boy supposed to do with an education? Till the fields with mathematical precision?”

Ben raises an eyebrow and Gabriel realizes how bitter he sounds.

“Anyway, coming here was the best thing that could have happened to me, even if I nearly died in the process.” He leans down to check on the bread. It’s rising nicely, not quite starting to brown yet, but it’s not even half done.

“Okay, no, you can’t say shit like that and then not explain,” Miguel says.

“The roof I and a few other people were on blew here in a storm, and I woke up in the hospital, badly injured. The island was flooded up to the second story and houses were being ripped apart. I’ve no idea if anyone else survived or where they ended up, so. So.” He trails off, not sure where to go from there. It’s a wild, dramatic story of luck and timing when he tells it the fun way, but when he thinks about how the rest of the colony is just gone now, and he has no way of finding out if any of them made it or if his entire childhood is gone forever, it ends up a lot less fun.

“Sorry your home was kind of fucked up,” Basil says awkwardly, like he’s trying to be gentle about the fact that Gabriel was raised by a cult.

“It’s alright, really. It’s not like they can send me back, even if I do mess up badly enough to get shipped out, and I’m told Chicago isn’t all that bad as long as you’re smart and careful.”

Ben snorts. “They lied.”

“Did they now?”

“It’s the homicide capital of the world. Most people who leave the fleet against their will are dead within the year. People die there. Smart people too.”

“I… shall keep that in mind. Thank you,” Gabriel says quietly. He feels like he would do better than the average fleet citizen in this dark hypothetical. He knows the world isn’t kind, that it doesn’t care about sharing or feelings or any of it, and he knows how to handle himself in a fight. He might not last long, but long enough to get out of Chicago and find somewhere safer to settle down, certainly.

“So. The dialect. You don’t exactly sound like an illiterate farm boy,” Phil comments.

“I learned to speak by reading. Mackinac Island English sounds absolutely nothing like this. My current dialect is closest to Fleet Modern Academic English, is about twenty years out of date, and is actually fairly common for people with a strong accent who come here later in life. Basically, I sound like an old engineer whose head is entirely up his own academic ass, because I learned the grammar of a more modern dialect by reading technical manuals and scientific papers.”

“Weird,” Rich says. “What does Mackinac Island English sound like?”

“It’s not entirely mutually intelligible with Fleet Standard. We could usually get a meaning across between two people by speaking slowly and repeating ourselves, but it took about a year of study before I really knew what anyone was saying to me,” Gabriel explains. “If you look at anthropological studies from five years ago you’ll find a lot of videos of us talking to each other, myself and the other refugees, but we’ve all gone native and no one speaks like that anymore in polite company.”

“Did you just try to call us polite company?” Phil asks with a snort.

“Is this the part where you take offense to me finding you palatable and have a bizarre competition to see who can be most disgusting?” Gabriel asks tiredly.

A couple of the younger men shuffle uncomfortably. Gabriel has spent too much time in all male company to not know the standard bonding experience, but not nearly enough to actually enjoy a race to the bottom.

“When you put it that way...”

“Not when there’s food involved,” Gabriel says definitively. They can be gross on their own time. Right now they’re baking.

“Yeah, that’s fair.”

“Were there any other questions? The loaves are nearly done,” Gabriel says, checking on the bread again. The oven has a window, which is just bloody convenient. He’s never used an oven that you could see into before.

Mitch raises his hand from the back. “What’s an oligarchy?” He’s been working on something on his screen for the last little while, but just gave it his thumb print and closed out of it.

“In very simple terms, people with more material wealth had more governmental power. The island didn’t strictly have a government, and was sort of an oligarchy the other way around, where the families with more social clout used their position to assign themselves more material goods, but I haven’t found a good word for that exact system in the couple years I’ve been reading about governmental structures. So, hereditary theological oligarchy it is. Your family was god’s will, so be grateful to be there at all and don’t cause problems, you rotten little bastard.”

“Mmm. Kinda weird that no one rescued you guys,” Mitch says.

“Most of the surrounding communities took the view that it was our right to be as batshit crazy as we pleased, as long as we stayed in our little colony and didn’t bother anyone else. They had more pressing concerns than 300-some primitive whack jobs. Like the Michigan Fleet and its habit of bombing anything that looked at it funny.”

“Hey. We haven’t bombed anyone in like twenty years,” Rich says.

Gabriel raises both eyebrows meaningfully. Twenty years isn’t all that long. It’s less time than most of these men have been alive.

“Okay, but we have a lot to lose if Detroit starts getting crazy ideas, or Ontario starts pumping more water than they deserve,” Mitch says.

“Agreed. I’m just mentioning that we weren’t a threat worth worrying about. Bread’s done.” He changes the subject before they can get any deeper into it. Gabriel pulls the baking tray out and sets it to one side to cool. “Yeast team, lets take a look at those loaves.”

The yeast has done its job and the loaves have risen beautifully. They’re ready for the oven after being scored so everyone can find theirs again. Not that there’s any difference between them, or that it matters who gets which loaf, but Gabriel knows how important it is to have ownership of your work and how good it feels to hold something you made all on your own.

“So where did all of you grow up?” Gabriel asks once the bread is in the oven, and everyone starts talking at once. Houseboats and communal living boats and how many parents and siblings they all have. Miguel has three moms and two dads, which seems wildly unfair to Gabriel, as compared to everyone else and their one-to-three parents each.

“I was grown in a test-tube,” Basil says, offhand.

“You’re _joking_ ,” Gabriel says.

Basil shrugs.

“How does that work?”

“Well, when a mad scientist loves his lab _very much,”_ Basil starts, and Nate and Rich explode into laughter. Gabriel doesn’t entirely get it, but he forces a bit of a laugh too.

“Man, are you not modded?” Rich asks. “That’s like the oldest tweak joke in the book.”

“No? No, we didn’t have that on the island. I’m just tall.”

“What do you mean you didn’t _have_ it?” Rich asks.

“We isolated just as gene mods started being safe and available, and it was something of a point of pride that none of our ancestors had them. Genetic integrity was this whole,” he waves his hand around, “thing, and it was sort of a thing that no one on the island was anything but a baseline,” Gabriel says awkwardly.

“That’s. Uh.” Rich looks like he’s struggling for something nice to say.

“Oh, it’s entirely fucked up. I’m not sad to have left that thought process behind. When I first came here I was a little bastard about it, and there was a fourhands medic who threatened to steal my hands every so often. Freaked me right the hell out until I smartened up about how gene mods actually work.”

Nate laughs at him. “That’s _so mean_. On behalf of the mod-”

“Oh no, don’t apologize. I deserved it.”

“Still. Sorry my cousin was shitty to you, even if you were shitty first.”

“Well on behalf of an island of largely shitty people, thank you for not stealing our hands,” Gabriel jokes.

“We usually go for people with all their fingers,” he jokes back.

  
  


“Are you alright,” Gabriel asks Mitch, once the bread is out of the oven and everyone has tried it, some of them for the first time ever. He’s been quiet, unnaturally so for someone who’s usually so rambunctious and talkative.

“Yeah. Yeah, just feeling kind of...” he makes a face, trying to find a word. “Quiet?”

“Mm. That happens sometimes.”

“I got my paperwork done, like, super fast,” he says.

“Is that what you were working on?”

“Yeah. I thought I was gonna have to do it tomorrow. Head was kinda, eh, earlier.” He shrugs. “Then it just zoomed.”

“That’s good. Let me know if you want to try doing this again. I make bread a few times a week, and can always use some help.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure.” He tries another bite of his bread. “This is really good. How does it… work?”

“Flour, water, and salt together make gluten, and gluten is delicious. The baking powder or yeast gives it air bubbles and makes it light and fluffy. Simplest thing in the world, if you know how it goes. I haven’t the foggiest why the fleet doesn’t do more baking, or why flour is a specialty food.”

Mitch shrugs. “Flour is probably hard to grow on a boat or something.”

“Not really. You just have to give it room to grow and plant it at the right time. People here just like potatoes better, I guess.”

“Too many people with gluten allergies, maybe?” Mitch asks himself.

Gabriel has no idea. He’s never known anyone allergic to gluten, but he also doesn’t think he’s ever talked about it, either. “Maybe.”

* * *

Gabriel meets Mitch in the gym for their usual walk on his day off. He hasn’t heard from him at all since the bread class, which isn’t all that odd, but it’s rare that they haven’t run into each other even once in four days, sharing a ship this small and running in at least partially the same social circle.

“Do you need to make bread again?” Mitch asks, before Gabriel can even say hello.

“I could, if you wanted to. Are you hungry?” He made bread yesterday, but he has plenty of flour and enough yeast that Mitch could make something if he needs to.

“Yeah. I mean, no, but I want to make bread. I got yelled at today,” Mitch says.

“By whom?”

“The Chief.”

Gabriel was half expecting something like this. “For being unfocused?”

“For being late. I wasn’t even late! It was less than five minutes, but I cut it close every day this week and he wants to know what’s going on with me. I don’t _know_!” He fists a hand in his hair and shakes his head. “This just _happens_ sometimes, and I feel like crap about it and I haven’t felt _good_ since the bread class or like I can pay attention to anything or get anything _right_.”

“Are you okay?” Gabriel asks gently.

“I just want to make bread,” Mitch says with a huff, not looking at him.

“Let’s go make some bread.”

Gabriel gets Mitch set up with some dough to knead and starts the oven preheating. Yeast bread this time, and Mitch got to measure and mix it himself. This is his loaf, start to finish. Gabriel is just here to guide him.

“Are you neurodivergent?” Gabriel asks when Mitch has been kneading for a few minutes and has settled down a little. His shoulders are lower, his expression is more relaxed, and he doesn’t look two unkind words from crying anymore.

“Not diagnosed,” Mitch says.

“So you’ve never sought a diagnosis, or you’ve never been recommended one?” Gabriel asks.

“Both? Both. I’m fine most of the time. This is just a really bad week for me and I’m kinda out of it. I’ll be fine by tomorrow, probably. Feels like it.”

“Alright. It wouldn’t hurt you to get a diagnosis if you wanted one,” Gabriel says. “Having a little support helps a lot.”

“Are you neurodivergent?” Mitch asks curiously.

“Mmm. Yes, but it’s not really a big deal.”

“Does anyone try to give you a hard time about it?”

“One or two people gave me shit on my last ship, but people here have been alright about it, for the most part. It’s really not as big a deal as it used to be. People can work just fine with a neurodivergence on record, and more people know that they’re not life or career ending now.”

“I’m probably not even neurodivergent,” Mitch tells his bread, not really looking at Gabriel.

“Maybe, but you remind me an awful lot of my cousin with the focus problem. Laine bounced off the walls unless you gave her something to knead or stir. Champion frog catcher, though.”

“Crap. Now I want to touch a frog,” Mitch says to himself.

“When we’re done with this, do you want to go to a terrarium ship and see if they’ll let you hold a frog?”

“I have work later. Chief switched my shifts around. I’m on third until I can get my head on straight.” He folds the bread and kneads it harder. “Stupid brain won’t stop fizzing at me.”

“Well it’s hard to over-knead bread, so keep on that as long as you like. I’m going to put together a little something to eat. What are your feelings on egg salad?”

“It’s okay.”

“Have you ever had an egg salad sandwich?” Gabriel asks. He doesn’t know how well traveled Mitch is or if he’s spent enough time in places that ate bread to have much of a taste for it.

“I had a chicken salad sandwich once. It was pretty good.”

“Same concept, but with eggs,” Gabriel explains. “I’ll make enough for two and we can have lunch while the bread is baking.”

“That sounds really nice,” Mitch says quietly.

Gabriel gives him a sort of side-hug and pats his ribs. He really needs to study how people give and receive physical affection, because simple hugs _shouldn’t_ be a foreign language to him. Mitch leans on him, and sets into his kneading with a will when Gabriel pulls away, like he’s trying to bruise the dough. Bread isn’t picky or delicate, and at worst will turn out a little stiff for the extra attention. Gabriel doubts he’ll hurt it, though. Mitch has strength, but not much in the way of stamina, and likely won’t have the staying power to knead that hard for long.

Sure enough, after a handful of minutes, Mitch drops the dough and stands back. “Alright. I feel better.”

“More focused?”

“Mostly. Little bit less upset.”

“Going to be on time for work?”

“Gonna be _five minutes early!”_ Mitch pumps his arms like he’s hyping himself up. “And I’m gonna work hard and do my stupid paperwork without being asked.”

“I believe in you. Sandwich?” Gabriel has egg salad put together and is slicing yesterday’s bread for it. As far as lunches go, it’s nothing special or exciting, but as hungry as he is it’s better than waiting for something better to cook.

“Sandwich!” he cheers, taking the one Gabriel offers him.

They eat in silence for a few minutes, enjoying lunch together with the dough rising to one side and the slow, misanthropic oven heating itself up on the other.

“Sandwiches are a weird mouth feel,” Mitch comments after a minute.

“How so?” Gabriel hopes he isn’t allergic to yeast. He’d like to do this more often, and baking powder is expensive. Fine for the couple things that need it, but his self replicating yeast culture is a huge money saver, as compared to things he has to buy for every loaf.

“Like… layers. And you bite into it and sometimes stuff comes out. Just feels different. Different from real food.”

Gabriel snorts. “This is real food. By the standards of most of the world, sandwiches are a staple food, not a delicacy.”

“The world is a weird place,” Mitch says like he agrees, like Gabriel has said something to agree with.

“Hey,” Gabriel starts.

“What’s up?”

“Thank you for being my friend,” he says awkwardly. He doesn’t know what he would do without the people he’s found here, who like him enough to not give him shit for how weird he is. He might actually end up with a friend group, instead of the weird mass of people he was attached to one end of at the mall, who only put up with him because he was huge and decent in a fight.

Mitch hugs him from the side and pats his ribs the same way Gabriel did, kindly, gently. “No problem. You’re fun. And you feed me sometimes. That’s more than I normally ask for from a friend.”

“Glad to know I’ve gone so far above and beyond your standards,” Gabriel says dryly, but hugs him back. Things are working out here. He has friends.


	9. Basil

“You should come inside,” Basil says to Gabriel, out on the sun deck. There’s not much sun right now. Mostly rain, actually, and wind, and cold, and Gabriel standing like some kind of weird movie protagonist, staring at the lake like he’s lost in thought. In the rain. And cold.

Gabriel looks at him, really looks into his eyes and through him that way he does sometimes, and nods. “You’re right.”

They stand and stare at each other for a long minute. Gabriel is soaked to the bone, hair plastered to his head and clothes clinging to him wetly, and Basil is getting there, just in a t-shirt and wrap where he didn’t expect to be outside in the bucketing rain for more than a few seconds.

“Please come inside?” he tries a little more directly. Gabriel still has a little brain damage, probably, after how Basil and Ben found him at the mall when they went searching for that anomalous weight signature in what was supposed to be an abandoned docking bay, for lack of any other clues about why the mall was turning itself inside out.

That’s an image that’s going to haunt Basil for the rest of his life, the internal wires of an overgrown set of implants growing through someone’s eye socket and moving, retreating back into his skull when light hit them. He still has a small, dark scar above his eye where they forced through his skull that Basil has a hard time looking directly at. He hasn’t been able to eat seaweed in weeks, either, except for flat, stiff, dried out seaweed chips.

It sometimes takes Gabriel a couple times to get what people are saying to him. That’s fine. In theory they’re fixing him. He’s still staring at Basil, though, not moving. “It’s freezing and your soaked. I don’t want you to get sick.”

“That’s a common misconception. You don’t actually get sick from the cold,” he mumbles.

“No,” Basil says patiently, “but you can still die of hypothermia, and that would make me very sad, so will you please fucking come inside? Before you die? Please?”

“Okay.” Gabriel gives the choppy, rain curtained expanse of the lake one last long look, then finally takes Basil’s outstretched hand and follows him inside, down the stairs and to the IST hall.

Halfway between the stairs down and his room, while Basil is still figuring out what he’s going to do with him, a switch flips and Gabriel animates, swearing and swiping rain and hair out of his face. “Mother _fucker_. I’m soaked through. What was I bloody thinking, going outside in this?”

Basil lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. That’s more like it. “Okay. Okay, you’re good now?”

“I think so. Fucking freezing and direly in need of a shower, and maybe some tea, but I’m not about to jump into the lake or something.”

“Were you… thinking about jumping?” Is he okay? Like, really okay? Jumping off a 200 isn’t a good plan, not the top deck, anyway. It probably wouldn’t kill him immediately, but he could get seriously hurt and maybe drown if no one found him right away, especially with the lake angry and unsteady like she is today.

“There may have been a few minutes where it wasn’t entirely off the table,” he mutters, “but no, not actively.”

“Okay. Okay? Showers? A shower sounds really nice right now. _Shit,_ it’s cold today.” Basil was _not_ dressed to go outside in the rain and can feel goosebumps prickling everywhere. A hot shower and a change of clothes sound wonderful, and he can think about a hot drink or something to eat if Gabriel is okay after that. This is _so_ not his field of study. He’s gotten pretty good at telling when Rich actually has a problem that needs solving and when he’s freaking out over nothing and just needs to sit down for a minute, but Rich, for all his anxiety and how much he drinks to deal with it, has never wanted to jump off a ship before.

Gabriel peels out of his sodden clothes while Basil works on the wet and shrunken knot his wrap tie has turned into, in the wash room. Basil does his best not to glance over too often, keep his eyes to himself, but it’s, okay, it’s a little distracting, and he has a natural curiosity. Gabriel usually keeps so covered, and his clothes are so loose and weird fitting, Basil can’t _not_ wonder what he’s hiding under them.

A lot of muscle, it turns out. His thighs are almost as thick as Rich’s, and his calves are like grapefruits when he finally kicks his sodden pants off. His shirt unzips from the shoulder, and he peels it down his body and throws it over a shower wall to drip.

“Are you okay?” Basil asks.

“It’s _cold,_ okay?” he snaps, hunched over around himself.

“Your shoulder, genius,” Basil says. He wasn’t even looking at his dick. Okay, he saw it, but he wasn’t dumb enough to comment on a little shrinkage.

There’s a livid red line from Gabriel’s collarbone out, with a divot of paler skin in the center the size of Basil’s thumb. There’s no blood, but it took a second look to be sure. It looks like it hurts, too, the way he’s holding it gingerly.

“Surgery scar. It doesn’t like the cold. Turns colors,” he says awkwardly, and turns the shower on to its hottest setting.

“What happened?” Basil takes the shower two down. They have space, with just the two of them in the washroom. There’s no reason to crowd him. There’s some privacy, but both of them are tall enough that their heads, and Gabriel’s shoulders, stick up above the divider walls.

“Bit of wood nearly killed me. Missed my heart by six inches, and I had to have that shoulder rebuilt. Bit of roofing beam, about yea big.” He holds his hands up about a foot apart and turns his face up into the spray. His skin goes from bluish pale to red and flushed after a few seconds, and he shifts, turning around to get the heat everywhere and warm up in sections. “And now that shoulder hurts when it rains.”

That’s a lot more roofing beam, whatever that is, than Basil would want in his shoulder. When Gabriel turns around there’s another divot on his back, a little offset like it didn’t go in straight. “Is that why your shirt has the shoulder zip?” Basil had to special order a new wardrobe when he lost his hand, before he built what he has now. Shirts with wider sleeves and pants he could button one-handed, but he hasn’t needed that consideration in years, and got to wear his old, favorite clothes again after he upgraded.

“It’s easier to get them on and off. Hurts less.” He stands with his head immediately under the shower head and says quietly, “Thank you, god, for installing showers for tall people _somewhere_ in this bloody country.”

Basil chuckles. “Rich says the same thing. He had to crouch on his last ship.”

“Where is Rich? Usually the two of you are attached at the hip.”

“He’s on a job. The _Versailles_ is having trouble with its watering bots and needs some expert help.” It’s Basil’s day off, and he’s determined to enjoy it, even though everyone else is busy and there’s not much of anyone to hang out with. He was really hoping to talk to Gabriel today, too, but maybe naked in the shower isn’t the right place for it. They have all day.

“Mm. Hope he’s back before tonight. There’s a storm moving in fast.” Gabriel rolls his shoulder against the heel of his hand and grimaces.

“We haven’t gotten an announcement about it.”

“My shoulder is very rarely wrong. This one feels bad, too.” He shuts off the water and stands for a second in the steam, then goes to dry off.

Basil spends an extra minute in the heat. He gets cold, colder than he likes, and anyway he doesn’t need to follow Gabriel around like a lost puppy. He likes him, but he’s not a little kid anymore. He’s grown out of that.

When Basil finally gets out of the shower, Gabriel is gone, probably back to his room to get dressed. Basil does the same, and he hears someone walking up and down the hall outside while he’s in his berth. He thinks he recognizes Gabriel’s slow, heavy footsteps.

It is Gabriel. A bug has gotten in, a moth, and he’s holding a ship cat up to catch it near the ceiling, chasing it around with a skinny orange tabby held above his head.

“What?” Gabriel asks when he notices Basil watching him from his doorway.

“Why don’t you just get a fly swatter or something?”

“And deprive Muffin of enrichment? For shame, Basil. For shame. And here I thought you were an animal lover.”

The cat snatches the bug between its paws and eats it. It crunches disgustingly and bits of moth fall to the floor.

“Good job!” Gabriel cheers.

“Is that cat’s name Muffin?” Basil didn’t think ship cats had names, most of the time. Not working cats on big ships like this. Houseboat cats are as much family pets as hardworking members of the community, so they usually get names, but this is a 200, not a little 5-crew. Maybe no one has filled Gabriel in on how it works.

Gabriel cradles the cat like a baby while it licks its paws. “I think so. This is either Muffin or Cilantro. I have a hard time telling them apart when they’re not right next to each other. Muffin is just a little bit lighter, more cream stripes and a little less orange.”

“Did you name him?”

“Phil did. I’m not allowed to name cats anymore after Bubbly, which I maintain is a perfectly good name for a cat with a sinus problem,” he says. Basil must look confused because Gabriel clarifies, “Bubbles came out of his nose sometimes.”

“That’s disgusting,” Basil laughs. “Why are you guys naming ship cats anyway?”

“They deserve names. They’re not equipment, and anyway, equipment gets named often enough. I’ve met too many hoverbikes with dumb names to let a lovely cat go nameless.” Muffin swats at his face. “Yes, we’re talking about you,” he says fondly.

“So you like animals?” Basil asks. That’s… kind of sweet, actually.

“I grew up with them. They’re one of the few things I miss from the island, goats and chickens and more cats and dogs than we knew what to do with. That, having a large family, and good food.”

“What’s wrong with the food here?” Basil asks.

Gabriel shrugs and sets the cat down. “Nothing, if it’s what you grew up with. I just prefer food that tastes like something.”

“That’s kind of rude.”

Gabriel shrugs again. “Would you like to join me for lunch? I have leftovers that aren’t flavorless rations.”

“Rude,” Basil says again.

He starts to walk away. “Suit yourself. Free helping of shrimp fried rice that’s going down the composter if no one eats it today, but certainly, your pride is worth more than your stomach.”

Basil wrestles with himself for a second, then follows after Gabriel at a quick clip. “If shrimp fried rice weren’t my favorite food,” he grumps when he catches up and falls into step with his long legged stride.

“Oh, good. You can eat a lot of it, then. I made way too much and it turned out _perfectly_.”

  
  


Basil was fully prepared to sulk the entire time he ate, because there’s really nothing wrong with blocks at all, thank you, and everyone sane and sensible knows it, but then he tries a bite and it’s a fight not to make some sort of noise or face or _something_. It’s incredible. He has to figure out what Gabriel put in it to make it taste this good, because Basil hasn’t had shrimp fried rice like this since Sun’s shut down a few years ago.

“Good?” Gabriel asks across the table with his own plate full. His shit eating grin isn’t doing him any favors. He’s still cute, but the smug isn’t Basil’s favorite look.

“Motherfucker...” Basil mutters to himself. “Yes, okay? It’s good. It’s the best fucking fried rice I’ve ever had. Are you happy?”

“Extremely.”

“Asshole,” Basil sulks.

“Yes, but I’m an asshole who can _cook_ , bringing me leagues above the other assholes on this ship, and also _you’re welcome_ for the free lunch.”

“Pretty good James impression,” Basil snarks.

Gabriel points at him with his spoon. “That was _direly_ uncalled for.”

Basil laughs at how comically offended he looks, and after a second Gabriel breaks character and joins him. “Anyway, what’s in this? It tastes just like this place I used to go.”

“Rice, shrimp, fish sauce, some veg, bit of garlic, bit of ginger. I just found a recipe that looked edible and tweaked it until I liked it.”

“Did you ever go to Sun’s? Little lunch boat that used to orbit the _Washington_. This tastes just like theirs.”

Gabriel squints at nothing like he’s trying to remember. “Maybe. It’s been a bit since I was in that neighborhood. Someone named Sun posts recipes online a lot, and they’re usually pretty good. His dumplings are the first ones I made that turned out right.”

“I never had the dumplings there,” Basil says. “Are they good?”

“I certainly think so. Maybe I’ll make some for you sometime.”

Basil swallows, feeling his cheeks heat up. “Can I talk to you about something?”

“Whatever I did, I didn’t do it,” Gabriel says quickly.

Basil giggles involuntarily. What does that even mean? He tries to keep cool and serious and adult, but something about ‘whatever I did, I didn’t do it,’ gets him and he can’t not laugh.

“Wait, shit. That makes no sense. Um.”

“I just wanted to know if you wanted to hang out sometime,” Basil says, dragging things back on track before they get too off topic. Again. He’s starting to think this is just how Gabriel lives, bouncing from thing to thing too fast to look at any of it for more than a second. Mitch used to do that, when they were kids, but he’s not thinking about Mitch right now.

“We’re… I thought we were hanging out right now,” Gabriel says, confused.

“I meant, like… you know.” Basil swallows again and takes a drink of tea. Why is his throat this dry? “A date.”

“Oh.”

Gabriel is staring at him like he’s trying really hard to not say the wrong thing, which isn’t really what Basil was hoping for. He thought things were going good with Gabriel. They got high together. They made bread. They hang out a lot and work together some nights, for Gabriel’s second half-shift. Things don’t always turn out perfectly, but he thought it was going okay and that Gabriel liked him too.

“I. Um. I thought you and Rich...” Gabriel starts.

“He’s okay with it. We talked about you a lot, and he thinks you’re really cute too. He has a couple other people he likes, too, and sometimes I hook up with Liam and him together. I think you would really like Liam. And Trimmer is pretty cool. He doesn’t really do the hookup thing, though.”

Gabriel goes uncomfortably pale. He’s always pale, almost the same shade as Rich, but he’s almost gray now, face bloodless and blank. “Oh. I. Um.”

“Are you okay?” Basil asks.

“...Fine. I’m fine. I’m just- It’s-”

“Oh god. You don’t like guys,” Basil realizes. How did he not catch that? He’s not the first person to take a stab at hooking up with Gabriel, and every time he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t get it. Usually it’s a joke or an offhand comment, not this direct, but Gabriel has never picked up on it or been any kind of receptive.

“No, I. I like men,” he says uncomfortably. “I just… don’t want to be… someone’s...” he trails off into a mumble.

“Don’t want to be… what?” Basil asks.

“I don’t want to be your second choice. I’m sorry,” he says quietly, looking down at the table.

“...What?” What does he mean by second choice? “Literally, what does that _mean_? Have you ever done poly before?”

“I- I have, and it was- It wasn’t good for me. Terrible, actually! I’m sorry. You’re- I like you, Basil. You’re extraordinarily sweet. But I don’t want… You have Rich. You don’t need me. I’m sorry.” He grabs his plate, shoves his chair back, and leaves, walking fast with his head down.

Basil isn’t sure if this is the part where he runs after him and shakes sense into him, or if he needs to let the issue rest until he can figure out something that will untwist whatever knots are in Gabriel’s head. He’s been in a poly thing before, but it wasn’t good for him? Is he okay? Did someone hurt him?

That was a lot. It was a lot of complicated feelings all at once. Basil hasn’t watched enough movies where someone gets turned down to know what his next move is. He’s used to getting laughed at when he asks someone out, not for the other person to leave crying, and he’s a little bit lost about what he needs to do next. _Family Fleet_ didn’t exactly cover _So The Guy You Like Just Got Out Of A Toxic Relationship_. Should he talk to him? Leave it alone? Pretend it never happened and try again some other time, when Gabriel is less scattered?

Gabriel likes him too, but doesn’t want to get together with him. Okay. Start at the beginning. Questions. Was that a hard no, a soft no, a conditional no, or is Gabriel just upset because he got hurt in a poly relationship before? Basil needs to do some research. What he meant, what he wants, what he was like before he got to the _Reliant_.

 _Second choice._ Jesus fucking christ. What were they doing on the mall?


	10. Gabriel

Gabriel sits on a cot in the med bay, holding the cup of hot, strong tea a medic was kind enough to give him and trying not to crush it in his trembling hands. Lightly. Don’t squeeze, and he can sip it when he can direct his own hands into movement again.

He punched an officer. He tried to tackle his crewmate. Things are fuzzy after that, with Rich getting him in an arm lock and his shoulder screaming at him and the storm howling and raging all around him. It’s all a mess, and he can’t get any of it to line up in his head. Then the ship lurched in a horrible way and the whole mad mass of people around Gabriel went down together. Ben was there a second later with his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. He said something. Helped him up.

And now Gabriel is here in the quiet med bay, watching the steam rise off of a cup of strong green tea with a dot bandage on his knuckles and a throbbing ache in his shoulder.

There’s someone sitting at the far end of the cot, an older man, gray hair, white engineer’s coat, reading text off a small screen.

“Welcome back,” he says.

“Hi,” Gabriel says, confused. “Did I… go somewhere?”

“There were a few minutes there where you weren’t responding to stimulus. We think you had a panic attack.”

“Oh.”

“How do you feel?”

Gabriel tries to find an answer that won’t get him locked up in the nearest medical ship, but everything he can think of is either absolute nonsense or a laughably transparent lie.

“Your file says you were diagnosed with storm anxiety four years ago, but it was taken off last spring. Do you happen to know why?” the engineer asks. His voice is gentle, and there’s nothing cruel hiding in his eyes.

“I was… better. Hadn’t had a panic attack in a while, hadn’t had trouble. The mall… fixed it. She was steady. The storms weren’t so bad with her, and I was better, and I could work and…” Gabriel rubs his mouth so the words stop coming out. His hand is wet from the rain, warm from the tea, and not as steady as he wants.

The engineer nods thoughtfully. “We also didn’t have any really big storms last spring. Biggest was a category three, if I remember correctly. If it’s the instability that bothers you, the movement of the ship, then it would make sense that between the new posting and the lighter season you didn’t have as much trouble as usual. That’s why we usually wait for a few years of consistent improvement before removing an active condition. Alright.”

“Alright,” Gabriel repeats. So he’s still crazy and still useless during the storms when his ship needs him most. Perfect. They moved him to the mall in the first place to see if that would help, and it did for a little while, but he can’t exactly go back there now, and he can’t get a new posting on the _Washington_ without causing all kinds of trouble for Bee. Anything smaller than a 200 and his anxiety would kill him. It used to be _Reliant_ or bust for Gabriel. Now he guesses it’s just bust.

“I’m not going to ask you to make a decision when you’re ten minutes out of a panic attack, but you need to start thinking about management options. We can medicate, adjust your work schedule, relocate you to a larger ship, or some mixture of the three.”

“Oh. I- I don’t…” None of those are good options. He’s already on so much medication, his department is so short staffed, and there aren’t any bigger ships that need him. There’s nowhere in the world for him, other than the little niche here he’s managed to find his way into, and if he doesn’t fit this niche anymore… what else is there?

“Like I said, you don’t need to worry about it tonight. What we’d like to do right now is give you something for the anxiety and let you sleep.”

Gabriel blinks hard a couple times. More medication. More drugs interacting with the cocktail he’s already on, that’s already barely keeping him steady.

“Another alternative is to keep an eye on you tonight and let you rest and calm down here, then send you back to your berthing once we know you’re not a danger to yourself.” He’s gentle about it, but the truth is staring Gabriel in the face. They don’t trust him. He’s a violent, insane criminal, and they don’t trust him.

“What- What medication?” He asks. His hands are shaking again, and he has nowhere to put his tea that it won’t spill. Gabriel can feel things getting brighter, the way they do when he starts to spiral.

“Gabriel?” The engineer says. He rescues the tea from his shaking grip, passes it to his foot, and sets it on the floor. He’s a fourhands. That’s nice. Some of his kindest medics have been fourhands. “Deep breaths, Gabriel. It’s okay. Focus on staying calm and present. No one is here to hurt you.”

Gabriel nods. Calm and present. Mental management. After a few deep breaths things will settle enough that he can think, and then they can talk more about medication.

The engineer still has his hand on Gabriel’s arm. It’s grounding, something real and not terrible to focus on, and it stops him from spiraling entirely out of his head. “I know some of what was going on at the mall. I’ve been reading the reports as they’re released. What those medics were doing was deplorable, and I promise you I don’t share their views or methods. I will never give you or anyone else anything they don’t understand and agree to. Okay? Deep breaths now. You have choices and options. No one is going to force you into anything.”

Choices. Options. Gabriel clenches his hands together a few times and makes himself focus. He’s on the _Reliant_. Travis isn’t here. “What medication would you want to give me?” His voice doesn’t shake too much. He almost sounds stable, like someone who can make a decision.

“Small dose of Xanax. We, well,” he makes an awkward face. “We know you haven’t had a bad reaction to it in the past. I feel safe giving you a single dose and letting you sleep.”

“Right, right,” Gabriel says, organizing his thoughts and feelings. He does well on Xanax, doesn’t lose his mind or spiral. He just stops being so bloody concerned with what’s going on around him and goes to sleep.

“Another option is for you to not take anything, stay here and rest tonight, and we assess you again in the morning. No major decisions are being made tonight. Don’t worry. Ben gave you the night off for a personal emergency, no strings attached, so you have a full 24 hours before anyone needs anything from you at all.”

Gabriel nods some more. Can he be stable and ready to work again in 24 hours? It’s asking a lot of his sparking, frazzled nerves, when he can still feel the ship rocking and swaying under him. At least there are no windows here. He can’t see the lightning or hear the howling of the storm, or see the water or feel the rain. This is the quietest spot he’s going to find on this ship. Can that be enough?

“If you’re not capable of returning to work by the start of your next shift, I’ll sign off on you taking an extended break and sitting this storm out. We’re not throwing you to the sharks. You don’t have to push yourself.”

“Okay,” Gabriel says softly. He has time. He has space. He’s going to stay here, at least for now, and they can make more decisions about him later, when he isn’t falling apart at the seams. “Can I sleep here tonight?”

The engineer nods. “I think that’s your best option, given your medical history. We’ll let you rest tonight, and Dr. Cook will be in to assess you in the morning. I’m Dr. Harrod. You can call me if you change your mind about the medication.”

Gabriel nods. That’s good. That’s reasonable. “Thank you.” He just wants to go to sleep.


	11. Mitch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Double update this week because the last chapter was just too damned short. You lucky ducks.

Problem: Mitch is developing a crush on his new friend. He didn’t notice until tonight, until Gabriel punched him, but he’s got it bad. It snuck up on him, bit by bit. Gabriel is fun, and funny, and gentle, and patient when he explains the weird stuff he’s learning, and so sweet and kind. The worst he’s done to anyone is his overly polite idiot thing, and that’s just funny. He can play it off of Mitch’s clueless innocence thing without breaking character, too, for a two-for-one infuriatingly stupid combo kill that’s the most fun Mitch has ever had messing with people. And they got to use it on James to stop him from picking on people.

Rich really just needs to toss James in the lake once in a while, a tired, overworked part of Mitch thinks. He tries not to give that part of himself too much attention, but it’s not a hundred percent wrong. Facing a natural consequence for bullying once in a while might curb his bad habits and teach James how to be prosocial, or else. It wouldn’t hurt anyone, really, and might make everyone’s life easier.

God, his head is everywhere tonight. Mitch hasn’t been honest-to-god knocked unconscious in a long time. He really didn’t expect Gabriel to hit that hard. Honestly, he never expected someone as quiet and gentle as Gabriel to throw a punch at all. There were definitely some extenuating circumstances at work. Gabriel was struggling with something. He was wide eyed and pale, paler than normal, and responded to being touched by lashing out instead of shrinking away like he usually does when someone brushes against him unexpectedly.

His metal knuckles cut the heck out of Mitch’s face, too. He got him right in the temple and left an inch-long cut that showed steel when he held it open, according to the medic giving him stitches. Mitch has never been punched in the temple before, so that’s exciting. Bec tells him he could have died or gotten some actual brain damage out of it, if Gabriel hit him harder or at the wrong angle.

That isn’t great, but Mitch can still talk and use his implants as far as he’s tested them, and he walked up to the med bay under his own power without losing his balance any worse than he normally does in a bad storm, so he’s not too upset about it. Gabriel didn’t mean it, definitely, and he didn’t actually manage to do more than knock him senseless for thirty seconds, so Mitch doesn’t want to hold it against him or try to hold him responsible for what could have happened if things were different. It didn’t, they weren’t, so it isn’t worth thinking about.

It takes a little while before the medical engineer on duty can sit down with Mitch. Busy night with the storm and everything, he guesses. It’s a bad one, a category six at least, so people are going to be falling into each other and their ships and the lake all night. Minor injuries happen during big storms, and treating them immediately stops them from turning into major injuries.

“Mitch, bouncing back quickly, as usual,” Dr. Harrod says. He’s good people, friendly and professional, treats people quickly when they come in with scrapes and is liberal with the painkillers. Dr. Cook likes to start with the minimum dose for everything and ramp up slowly, even though it can leave people in pain for half an hour or longer.

“Yup. Ready to get back to work as soon as I’m cleared,” Mitch says. “Plenty to do tonight, and never enough hands to do it.”

“Yes, Avram has made that much exceedingly clear,” Dr. Harrod doesn’t sound amused about it. “Well, there’s not enough reason to hold you here that anyone will let me do it. You’re free to go. Keep implant use light tonight and come back if you start to feel dizzy or nauseous. I want to see you again in the morning for a full diagnostic as well, no matter how you feel tonight.”

“Can do,” Mitch says, and hops down from his cot. “Do you know, is Gabriel okay?” They would definitely take him to the med bay, right? He wasn’t okay, earlier. Mitch may not be a genius, but he could tell that much.

“He’s resting and recovering now. He’ll be fine by morning.”

“Good. Any idea what happened?”

“Not that you need to be concerned about, Officer Ford. Gabriel is fine. He’ll have recovered by morning and will be back at work as soon as he’s able.”

Mitch doesn’t push it, just says “Okay, if you say so,” and leaves. Medical and security butt heads sometimes about when injured crew members need to get back to work, but Mitch was asking as a friend, not the officer Gabriel punched. He thinks medical should be able to separate the two, but they aren’t as good at compartmentalizing work and leisure as security needs to be. You have to be able to put it away sometimes. Not having time away from work is how people burn out.

Mitch touches his temple. He has a pain patch over a layer of wound sealant, and two stitches under all of that. That’s about as tightly as they could have taped him up without a time machine. He’s not in danger of splitting stitches and bleeding all over everything. There’s a little blood on his uniform still, but he’s soaked to the skin anyway and it’s all going to get rained off before the night is over. He’d put good money on it. He gets back downstairs in record time and goes back to patrolling the docking bay for any petty fighting or illegal activity.

He really hopes Gabriel is okay. There was something really wrong earlier. Maybe Gabriel saw something, or someone said something to him. It’s only around 1900. Only the larger half of the ships have docked. Mitch can probably find out who he was dealing with last and if they had anything to say to Gabriel, really sleuth out whose fault this is and what needs to change for next time. He can probably fix this while Gabriel is laid up, and then they’ll have something to talk about tomorrow.

Or maybe he can just ask Gabriel what happened the next time he sees him. It won’t be that long, and Mitch won’t have to struggle to make heads, tails, or middles of the docking manifest. It probably makes sense if you know what you’re looking for, but Mitch had no idea how much of a mess it was until he needed one piece of specific information and was greeted with an endless wall of disorganized data. Looking through it, he can feel his brain trying to escape out his ears and make a break for open water. He closes the docking manifest before he loses his mind and keeps walking. They can talk about it tomorrow, and Mitch will take care of whatever is wrong over the next few days. There’s no huge rush. This storm is going to last a while.

Mitch spends an unfortunate amount of time figuring out what he’s going to say to Gabriel the next time he sees him. A joke, maybe? How can he make this funny? It’s not a comedy rich situation, but that’s never stopped Mitch before. He can wring jokes from stone if he has to. He takes another pass around the docking bay, thinking it over, and comes up with roughly nothing. Mitch likes Gabriel, and Gabriel… punched him. That’s just not funny from any angle.

He really hadn’t realized how much he cared about Gabriel until he woke up face down on the floor. He liked him, sure, but Mitch likes a lot of people. He’s friends with just about everyone, and easy with affection, physical and verbal, giving and receiving. There was a moment, though, between being punched and being unconscious, where Mitch felt… betrayed? It was less than a second, and it’s kind of hard to organize into words now, but the thought that Gabriel would hurt him on purpose – it wasn’t on purpose, definitely, but Mitch can only see that in hindsight – ached the way rough housing with Rich and Basil, or messing around hand-to-hand with Hayden or Will, doesn’t.

Maybe he should apologize. He shouldn’t have grabbed him. Mitch was so caught up in “this is my friend having a hard time” that he didn’t follow protocol for a larger crewmate behaving erratically. He shouldn’t have approached in the first place, and when the ship lurched he definitely shouldn’t have used larger, comparatively more stable Gabriel to try to catch himself. It’s easy to forget just how strong he is. He walks miles and kneads bread every single day. Neither is a massive workout, but it’s every single day, and has been for his entire life. Gabriel might not be able to take a punch, but he can sure throw one.

Shoot, no, that’s not funny either. Best case scenario, Gabriel starts apologizing and doesn’t stop until Mitch has healed up. Worst case, Mitch doesn’t know worst case actually, and doesn’t have time to obsess about it when he’s supposed to be patrolling. He’s been standing at the tea carafe for the last ten minutes of his five minute break, and someone is bound to notice him slacking eventually. He slugs back the second half of his finally cool enough to gulp tea, sighs out a puff of steam, and sets out for another lap.

He’ll figure it out. He has time. No one is going anywhere tonight.

  
  


“Gabriel! Hey, over here!” Mitch calls from the other side of the med bay. He’s getting a full round of testing done on his implants to make sure they weren’t damaged last night and is stuck in bed with magnets attached to his temples for the next couple hours. His brain scan came back clean, just like he knew it would, but Dr. Cook is determined to find something wrong with him.

Gabriel freezes and stares at him for a long, long moment. He looks better than last night, but not by much. He’s dry and someone has gotten him clean clothes, but other than that he’s kind of a wreck. No shoes, one sock, hair in a ponytail that looks like it was done without brushing it first, and he’s not even wearing his gloves.

He pads over and stands at the end of the cot, still staring at Mitch.

“You okay, buddy?” Mitch asks.

“Have you… You’ve… You haven’t been here all- all night, have you?” Gabriel asks.

“No, course not. I got here an hour ago. They’re just doing scans to see if I need any implant work done or if I can keep putting maintenance off like the idiot I am.” He tries to end on a light note and not make Gabriel uncomfortable.

“You- you should- You should do your- your routine m-maintenance. It can go… go…” He blinks hard a couple times. “Do your maintenance.”

“Okay, don’t worry. I’ll do my maintenance when I need to,” Mitch soothes. Something’s definitely wrong. “I’m fine, though. Don’t even have a headache.”

“Okay.” He’s still staring at Mitch, standing with his arms hanging limp at his sides.

Mitch had never noticed how busy his hands usually were until suddenly they weren’t. He’s not tapping his fingers or messing with his hair or twisting a loose thread from his shirt or anything. It’s bizarre. “You wanna sit?”

Gabriel sits mechanically on the cot, cross legged with his hands in his lap.

“Are you okay?” Mitch asks again.

“I have st-storm anxiety,” he says blankly, like he’s mentioning that the lights are on or the walls are white, not like he’s been diagnosed with a serious medical condition.

“Oh. Dang.” Mitch really has no idea what to say about that kind of news. He’s heard of people with storm anxiety, but didn’t know anyone personally, or what do to about it, or how to help. “Do you know what you’re gonna do?”

“Xanax,” Gabriel says. He blinks again, looks straight up at the ceiling for a second, then goes back to staring at Mitch.

“I think they gave you a little too much,” Mitch says gently. “Did you see something?”

“No,” he says in a tone that makes Mitch think he’s lying.

“There you are.” Dr. Cook jogs over. “We _can’t_ keep doing this, Gabriel.”

“What’s he doing?” Mitch asks.

“He keeps trying to leave the med bay. There was a small mistake in his records that led to a slip-up when Dr. Harrod medicated him a couple hours ago, and now he’s extremely stoned and doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“I-I’m walking.” Gabriel is staring at Dr. Cook now with that disconcerting concentration.

“He’s picked two locks, slipped a handcuff, and tricked a medic into leaving him unsupervised, all while having no idea where he is.”

“I’m going for- for a- for a walk,” he says louder, still with absolutely no inflection.

Dr. Cook puts his hands on Gabriel’s shoulders. “I need you to listen to me, Gabriel. You cannot go for a walk right now. You are high, and I can’t let you wander around unsupervised. I don’t have the manpower to send someone with you, so I need you to stay in bed and sleep. Do you understand? _Sleep_.”

Gabriel stares at him blankly and slowly, so slowly, reaches up to hold Dr. Cook’s face.

“Fuck’s sake,” Dr. Cook mutters.

“Can I try something?” Mitch asks.

“Sure. What can it hurt?” He sounds like he’s rapidly approaching the end of his rope.

Mitch reaches through the crowd of screens opening and closing automatically around him and takes Gabriel’s hands, unwrapping them from Dr. Cook and pulling them, and Gabriel with them, closer to himself. “Gabriel? Honey? We’ll go for a walk later, okay? Right now we’re too busy.”

“When?” he asks. The single thread of his attention is on Mitch now.

“Soon,” Mitch promises.

“ _When_?”

“In three hours.” Mitch will be done with his scans by then and can take Gabriel down to the treadmills himself, if he remembers what he’s waiting on for that long. “But only if you relax and don’t try to leave again.”

Gabriel nods. “Okay. Okay. Three- three hours.”

“Okay,” he agrees. “So right now I need you to lie down,” Mitch pulls on Gabriel’s hands, and he capsizes against Mitch, half of him stretched out, half of him curled up uncomfortably on the cot. “And relax.”

“Okay.”

“That was remarkably well done,” Dr. Cook comments.

Gabriel has his head on one of Mitch’s shoulders and is cuddling him like he did last time he got stoned. Mitch shrugs the opposite shoulder. “Civilian too high to function is a 23-19. There’s protocol for it.” Mitch genuinely has been trained in how to deal with a civilian crewmate who’s out of his mind on some substance. Protocol is to calm, isolate, and let them come down somewhere safe with someone watching them for overdose. Mitch isn’t exactly isolating Gabriel, but calming him down and keeping an eye on him is basically his duty at this point. “It helps that he likes me to start with.”

“Do you feel comfortable staying with him for the next few hours? I can...” Dr. Cook checks a screen. “I can probably spare a medic to watch him, but…” He makes a face. Med is short staffed now too, and this is a busy time of year. “My kingdom for an intern. Honestly.”

The trained medical engineer is pretty frazzled for being a grand total of three hours into his twelve hour shift. But then, he’s been dealing with Gabriel, on top of a storm’s usual flood of minor injuries. “Nah, I’ve got him. All hands on deck. I get it. We’re not going anywhere soon, and I’ll give you a buzz if he decides he wants to run away again.”

“Thank you. You’ve probably saved me from having to start a manhunt.”

  
  


Dr. Cook leaves, and it’s another hour and a half before anything interesting happens. Mitch has a data ring he’s using to watch a couple episodes of _Splat!_ to pass the time, Gabriel has fallen asleep against his side, and he’s trying not to enjoy that too much. Gabriel is out of his mind on medication. He doesn’t have the space in his brain to consider things like implications and boundaries, or the complications of Mitch’s growing feelings for him.

He talks in his sleep. It’s all nonsense, and some of it is in a dialect that Mitch only kind of understands. It’s kind of fun to listen to, though, in a confusing sort of way. Mitch has no idea what “Git yer gone,” is supposed to mean, but Gabriel mumbles it a few times in a row, then jerks awake and looks around, confused and still pretty blitzed on xanax.

“Morning sleepyhead,” Mitch says. He has an arm around Gabriel’s shoulders to keep him in place. He jostles him lightly and gives him a smile.

“Where- where are they?” he asks. He struggles upright, still looking around like he’s trying to find something.

“Where are what?”

“The-” Gabriel does another full scan of the med bay. “The angels. I don’t see them. They’re… are they- Where are they?”

Mitch’s brows furrow and he bites his the inside of his lip. Angels. Is Gabriel okay? Mitch knows he’s neurodivergent and doesn’t like to talk about it, but Mitch assumed it was depression or PTSD or something, one of those things a lot of immigrants end up with before they come somewhere safer and less mind bendingly stressful. Is he… crazy? Like actually crazy?

“No, don’t- don’t worry. They’re not- It’s safe. They won’t hurt you,” Gabriel promises. “They just… watch. It’s okay. They only want to- to watch us.”

Mitch moves slowly, calmly, and pages Dr. Cook. “Are there usually angels around, watching us?” he asks. Okay, don’t panic. This might just be an anxiety thing, or an overdose thing. Stress response from storm anxiety. People have mental breakdowns over less.

“Some-sometimes. Not always. They’re… nearby, usually. I- I think.” He rubs between his eyebrows and mutters, “Why can’t I _think_?”

“You took a lot of medication this morning, and we think you’re having a bad reaction to it,” Mitch explains gently.

“Med-medi- God. God f-fucking- Medi-fucking- God damn it,” Gabriel stutters.

“Hey, it’s okay. Try to stay calm. Dr. Cook will be here in a minute. He can help you.”

“I’m… ‘m fine. Just- just. Fine.”

Mitch gets himself ready to subdue Gabriel. Usually he would want another person with him for backup, especially with someone so much bigger than him, but he thinks he can handle this. Gabriel is twitchy and erratic, not angry, not violent, and Mitch knows not to underestimate him this time. All he’s doing right now is scrubbing his palms over his face and mumbling to himself, stuttering too quietly for Mitch to really understand over the noise of the crowded med bay. He’s not… dangerous. Just confused.

Then Dr. Cook is there, moving fast. “What’s wrong?” he asks.

“He’s-” Mitch starts at the same time as Gabriel says “I’m-”

“Gabriel,” Dr. Cook says.

“I- I f-forgot my- forgot m-my fuck-fucking… Last night. Late. P-panic attack. I’m- I forgot, and I’m- I’m have-having.” He groans and scrubs his face harder with the heels of his hands.

“I understand,” Dr. Cook says, calm as anything. “Come with me, and we’ll get your medication. You only missed the one night?”

Gabriel nods and scrambles off the cot. He stumbles a little on the dismount, but doesn’t fall or run into anyone.

Dr. Cook takes his arm in a firm grip and leads him away. “We’ll synthesize the dose and give you the rest of the day to calm down. You’re not going back to work tonight. I’ll talk to Ben. They got along fine without you before this, so they can get over it and manage.” And then they’re through another door, into one of the private exam rooms where Mitch can’t hear them anymore.

So, that happened. Mitch is still sitting on his cot, still getting his full diagnostics run, and his _Splat!_ episode is still playing on the little screen over his hand. Someone just got slimed and the slow-mo recap is running on repeat from every angle. It’s awkwardly mundane, after what just happened. And he still has no idea what just happened.


	12. Mitch

“So. Neurodivergent,” Mitch says the next time he sees Gabriel. It’s been a few days. Mitch’s implants were fine after a slightly overdue routine update, and he was back at work as soon as that was done. The _Reliant_ only has the six officers. She took on an extra ten from docked boats, but sixteen guards still aren’t enough to actively patrol a 200 with four times the normal occupancy and catch everything.

He’s been trying to check on Gabriel in the med bay for the last two days, between double shifts, and has been turned away every time with a cold, blank report that Gabriel was in good hands and didn’t want visitors. Today they told him he’d checked out that morning.

Mitch messaged him when he got off work, asking if he was okay and if he wanted to hang out, and got a wordless location marker back. Gabriel was in his berth. Now Mitch is in Gabriel’s desk chair, Gabriel is in bed fully clothed, and they’ve been staring at each other, waiting for the other to say something first, for longer than is comfortable.

“Neurodivergent,” Gabriel says eventually. “Type D, more specifically.” His voice is… blank, like he couldn’t care less about what he’s saying.

“I don’t know what that means,” Mitch says.

“You’re, what, type A? Able to work nearly any job without a diagnosis and with little to no external support? Type D means I’m three degrees more ND than you and require a higher level of support to do the same things.”

“Okay, I still don’t know what that means for you. So you… take medication?”

“I take medication,” he agrees. “I’m supposed to. When I don’t, I get a bit… off. Off kilter. I lose track of things.”

“Do you… usually think there are… angels?” Mitch really doesn’t know how to ask about this. Maybe it was just a storm anxiety thing, a tiny little mental breakdown that doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme, and it can be something funny they bring up when they’re ribbing each other. Mitch can tell him about when he did stress training as a cadet and stayed up for four days straight of drills and testing, and by the end of it had developed a caffeine cult with the other cadets from sheer collective mental overload. They worshiped the great bean and chanted at water to make it boil faster. Things got kind of weird around day three, a little scary by day four, and it’s funny now, two years later.

Gabriel sighs and rolls onto his back so he’s not looking anywhere near Mitch. “You know how I grew up. Compulsory religion. Stressful situation. Very little in the way of formal health care, particularly for mental health.” His voice is flat and blank. Just another Wednesday, being abused and seeing things that aren’t there. “My childhood was steeped in religion, and everything came back to it somehow. When I started seeing things no one else could, light and shadows and fire where there was nothing, it was obviously a holy sign from god and I was encouraged to pay attention and tell people what I saw. The… visions. God. I fucking hate calling them that,” he snarls, then takes a deep breath. “The hallucinations got stronger the more attention I paid them, and started forming themselves into what my head was already stuffed full of. Angels and demons, heaven and hell, the voice of god, and I was hailed as a prophet at the extraordinarily stupid age of twelve. A few years of that, and then we washed up in a place with modern medicine and a less idiotic view of mental disorders. I told a medic on the  _ Washington  _ what the angels thought of her and had my first psychiatric evaluation about an hour later. Got involuntarily medicated until I was able to understand what a schizo-affective disorder was and how it was negatively  impacting my life, then I started voluntarily taking the medication and cut off contact with most of the rest of the refugees. I still talked to my mother some, but she never really wrapped her head around why I would give up being a prophet,” he spits the word out like it’s sour, “and tried to kill me. I had implants at that point and called for help, got legally separated from her, and she got some help for what turned out to be a milder case of the same disorder. So that’s fun, to know it’s definitely genetic. We haven’t seen each other since.”

“I’m so sorry,” Mitch says for lack of anything better coming to mind. All of that sounds horrifying. He has no idea how Gabriel… survived, honestly. And he’s managed to thrive and only be type D neurodivergent after everything.

“I get updates on her, sometimes. She’s working in a bakery now, doing well and lying about taking her medication.”

Mitch shifts out of the chair and down to sit next to Gabriel on the floor, head just about level with his on the bed. “Sorry your family…” Drove you insane. Tried to kill you. Isn’t in your life anymore. “…sucks. At least you’re away from them and safe now, right?

Mitch has no idea what he said or why it was so overwhelming for Gabriel, but his eyes well up and his breath hitches, and a second later Mitch realizes he’s crying, quietly, steadily, still staring at the ceiling with no expression on his face.

“Are you… okay?”

“I’ve tried with everything I have to get away from them, to not be like my parents, and the harder I try, the clearer it is how much I inherited from both of them.”

“Okay, so you have the same neurodivergent stuff as your mom. That’s… You’re working on yours, and taking your medicine and being functional and trying and… like…” Mitch is at a loss. His expertise is stopping problems before they get any momentum, and this problem has been in motion since before he knew Gabriel existed. He doesn’t know what to do here or how to keep from making it worse.

Gabriel is looking at him now, and he looks broken to his core.

Mitch has no idea what he did or said to turn him from blank to broken, but he wishes he could stuff the words back in his mouth and unsay them. “What?”

“I hurt you,” he says softly. “I could have killed you.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t. I’m fine. Didn’t even need repairs.” Mitch just wants to make this okay, to make it be over. His stitches healed cleanly and he barely even has a scar from it. Four little dots from the stitches and a new line on top of his old implant scars. You can’t even tell unless you know what you’re looking for.

“My father was a violent, abusive man,” Gabriel starts to explain out of nowhere. “He turned to anger any time he was scared or confused or… anything really. I’ve worked so bloody hard to be different, but the moment I was anxious and confused and not thinking clearly I- I hit the nearest person.”

“No, Gabriel, stop. That was on me. I shouldn’t have grabbed you.”

“God,” he whispers. “Please. _Please_ don’t apologize for what I did to you. Please.”

“ No, I’m. No, fuck no.” Mitch has to indulge in a swear. It feels like there’s something burning in his chest, hot and angry trying to claw free. “You’re not… abusing me.  _ Fuck _ . I saw that you were struggling and was stupid and tried to fix it myself instead of calling for backup like I’m supposed to. Like I’m  _ trained  _ to. Larger crewmate behaving erratically is a basic simulation that I fucked up in the field because I’m stupid and I l ove you and I wasn’t thinking. You were having a panic attack. I grabbed you. That one was completely my fault because I’m really, no lie, supposed to know better.”

“I shouldn’t have put you in that situation. I’m so sorry.”

Mitch groans and lays his head on Gabriel’s mattress. “You don’t have to apologize. You have storm anxiety. That’s, like, the gold standard excuse for messing up during a storm. You’re fine.”

Gabriel is quiet for a minute, staring at nothing in the way that means he’s looking for the right words. “So you… love me,” he says.

That definitely is something that Mitch said. Sort of blurted it out in the middle of things. He was really hoping Gabriel wouldn’t catch it, but wish in one hand, spit in the other. “Yeah,” he admits.

“Like… in a friendship way?”

“Um.”

“Or in a… kind of… dating sort of way?”

Mitch feels hot across his cheeks. “Kind of the second one.” He’d pictured this being a lot cooler and more romantic in his head, when he pictured it at all, maybe with a sunset or an explosion or something in the background and the two of them kissing after doing something heroic and amazing. Instead he’s in Gabriel’s room on his floor, with his friend who he likes a lot more than is really right in bed, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. The little bit of sky he can see through the window is night-dark in the middle of the day. There’s the occasional flash of lightning and rumble of thunder, but not often enough to be cool and dramatic.

“Oh.” Gabriel scrubs at his face. He’s blushing too, flushed and embarrassed. “Do you want to… go out sometime? Maybe once the storm is over?”

“It’s.” Mitch groans. “It’s not that simple. There’s a lot of paperwork I have to do if I want to date someone and keep my job, then you have to do some paperwork saying you agree to some conditions, and then it has to be processed and approved before we can actually, like, date,” he explains. It’s kind of a mess and usually a lot more trouble than it’s worth.

Gabriel rubs his mouth. He has a little bit of stubble, a thin growth of blond fluff on his chin, that he really ought to shave. Mitch understands why he hasn’t, if he’s only been out of the med bay for a few hours, but it looks kind of uncomfortable and makes a scratching sound against his palm. “What kinds of conditions? And how long is the paperwork going to take to process?”

“Just some common sense stuff. Like we’re going to have to be monogamous and not date anyone but each other. Security can only do poly in like a couple really specific circumstances. We’ll also be sort of… engaged.” Mitch really wishes things were different, that he could have a casual relationship without it getting immediately involved and weird, but he doesn’t think Gabriel is going to hold the legal situation against him. “Like we don’t have to get married right away or anything, but, like, there’s some legal stuff. Like cohabitation rights and schedule sharing and stuff.” That wasn’t his only question. “Paperwork goes quick, maybe a week. Then we can go on, like, dates and stuff.” Why is his face this red? Mitch has talked this over before, when he was thinking about asking Basil out and wanted to know what he needed to do first to do it right, but that was with Chief Appleton, and Mitch didn’t name any names or let on how desperately in love he was with his best friend. He feels like the chief might have known anyway, but he was nice enough not to rake Mitch over the coals about it.

Then Basil turned him down in so many little ways, day after day, his heart cracked a thousand microscopic times, and he never brought up how seriously he had looked into it. Mitch gave up on love and put his energy into friendship and fun, and it was fine. Basil found Rich, then Liam, and Mitch got used to being just friends and joked about being in love less and less a little at a time.

Then he met Gabriel.

“Would it be okay if I kissed you?” Gabriel asks. He’s shifted up onto one elbow and is looking at Mitch, gaze shifting between his eyes and his mouth, and occasionally landing on his blush and how Mitch is kind of gripping Gabriel’s bottom sheet, just for something to fidget with. Gabriel is pink too. He doesn’t turn the full strawberry red that Mitch does, just flushes a beautiful peachy color right across his cheeks.

“Um… it’s a little bit illegal, but I won’t tell if you won’t,” Mitch says. He wasn’t even thinking about that, but now that it’s on the table, maybe, he’s never wanted anything as much as he wants to kiss Gabriel.

“Just the once, then,” Gabriel decides. “That can’t be more than petty fraternizing, right? And it’s hardly premeditated, and I can keep things mum as long as the paperwork won’t take more than a week or so.”

The absurdity of being arrested for premeditated fraternization hits Mitch and he starts laughing, head down on Gabriel’s bed, shoulders shaking. God. God. Why did he wait this long to ask him out?

“Did I say something funny?” Gabriel asks, pitch perfect puppet polite. “Petty fraternization is a terribly serious crime, I’m sure. We may face jail time if we’re caught. Hopefully they’ll put us in the same cell, and then we can have our first date in prison.”

Mitch wheezes with laughter at the idea of a romantic candle lit dinner in the brig. “You’re so weird. Come here.” He gets a hand on the back of Gabriel’s neck and pulls him down for a kiss.

Mitch hasn’t kissed anyone in years, not since before he started cadet training. He knows people who cheated the law, just a little, in training, but he never had the chance, and he likes to think he wouldn’t have even if he did. Here and now, though, he’s not throwing away his first real shot in a long time just because he might get chewed out a little for it. He’s doing paperwork ASAP. This can be his one moment of weakness before he gets there, and it’ll be retroactively justified in a week or less.

He goes into it expecting to take the lead and have some fun with someone who, from the way he talks, isn’t that interested in romance. He really doesn’t expect Gabriel to be as good at it as he is. After a few tentative seconds, he takes control and guides Mitch through the softest, gentlest, best kiss he’s ever had. Mitch is still working with an outdated teenager’s experience, even if he has enough enthusiasm to make up for a lot, and it takes him a minute to catch up and follow along with someone who knows what he’s doing and has had time and space and partners to practice. And apparently he’s really, really good at it.

Mitch tries to pay attention and take notes so he can do a better job next time, if there is a next time, but he keeps getting distracted and forgetting that he’s trying to learn, not just enjoy himself. The little flick of Gabriel’s tongue into his mouth is extremely distracting. So is having his lip bitten and his hair played with, it turns out. And having his ears touched makes him shiver, which is interesting. The beard fluff is a little bit scratchy and not amazing, but it’s not bad with everything else going on. Then Gabriel traces his fingers up the back of Mitch’s neck and his brain shorts out for a second.

“God,” Mitch breathes when he can think again. Kissing someone who knows what he’s doing is… completely different. Being an adult is different. Mitch got to skip his awkward teenage fumbling, great, but now he’s 20 and thinking about starting something real and serious with someone he doesn’t have a lifetime of history with, with no experience.

At some point he climbed into bed with Gabriel and is straddling his hips. Gabriel is leaned back against the wall, holding onto Mitch’s hip with one hand and exploring him with the other. Having a three-fingered hand carded into his hair feels… interesting, but Mitch has no frame of reference, no one else in his life who ever liked messing with his hair before today, so he’s not sure how to quantify it.

“Well hello there,” Gabriel murmurs. He runs a hand down Mitch’s thigh, and Mitch is suddenly extremely aware that he has a hard on, the first one he’s gotten in at least six years. He cracked his suppressants with nothing but a little kissing.

“Oh,” Mitch says. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

Gabriel laughs and collapses with his head on Mitch’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’m not making fun of you. Do you want help with that?” His hand is still on Mitch’s thigh and he’s tracing the outline of his dick with his thumb.

Panic and revulsion shoot through Mitch. “No? No, that’s… Gabriel, that’s actually illegal. Not just a slap on the wrist. I could lose my job.”

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” Gabriel murmurs, and kisses his neck.

Mitch’s pulse jumps and he has to forcibly shove himself off of Gabriel and to the other end of the mattress before he does something stupid and ends up with a hickey or something. This isn’t okay. It doesn’t matter what he wants or how badly, or how new and exciting this is, or how Gabriel is looking at him, he can’t do this right now.

“Aww.”

“Gabe, please, listen to me. I know I joke a lot and we’re friends and I don’t power-trip and stuff, but this is actually seriously a huge abuse of power. I can still arrest you right now, so we can’t fool around, or I’ll be technically legally assaulting you. Get it?”

Gabriel stares at him for a long moment. “Not really, no. I’m not going to tell anyone, you’re not going to tell anyone, so what does it matter what we get up to in the privacy of my room?”

Mitch blows out a breath. “Okay. Okay so there’s a lot we need to go over right now. Big brain, activate. _Go_. Stop thinking with your dick, _idiot_ ,” he tells himself. Gabriel snickers at him, but leaves him to it. His boner deflates with a little concentration and a lack of touching, and goes from being an urgent alert in his hindbrain to something a little uncomfortable and awkward that he’s aware of, but not terminally distracted by.

“First thing, illegal stuff is still illegal even if no one knows you did it. Little stuff like making out with someone you’re not supposed to is so petty it’s not worth the paperwork to punish. Sexually assaulting you is a serious crime that I could lose my job or worse over, and this is going to shock you, but I don’t want to commit a felony, even if I don’t think anyone is going to find out about it.”

Gabriel’s good humor disappears and mouth turns into a thin, troubled line. “Okay. Okay, I’m with you so far, but I’m still wildly unclear on how me giving you a handjob could be misconstrued as you assaulting me. Walk me through it? I’m missing something.”

“Because I’m still in a position of power over you.”

Gabriel snorts.

“ I’m not joking! I can arrest you for  _ anything  _ and it’ll take time and work for you to prove you’re innocent and get it scrubbed from your record. Dirty security does it a lot more than anyone wants to admit. Sometimes they get caught and removed from duty, but that takes time and work, too, and they usually get a lot worse before they’re bounced.”

“But you won’t. You would never,” Gabriel says.

“ But I  _ could _ , and that’s enough for me to coerce you into something you don’t want to do. That’s why there’s a blanket ban on security having sex with civilians. We make a lot of noise about distractions and duty and being married to the job, but it’s just a cover. Until the paperwork goes through, we can’t hook up, even if we both want to.”

“Paperwork.” Gabriel squints at him, trying to put all the pieces together and missing something important. Jeez, he’s probably still high. This was pretty much the worst possible time for this, but Mitch never expected things to get this serious, this fast.

“The paperwork makes it so I can’t arrest you anymore,” Mitch explains. “No more legal power over you, specifically, so I can’t threaten you into sex.”

Gabriel nods to himself and chews on his knuckle for a moment. “I can see… several flaws with this system.”

“It’s not perfect.” Mitch shrugs. He knows that, definitely. He’s had a lot of time to think it over and poke holes in it from different angles. It’s not airtight, but he hasn’t had any brilliant ideas to make it better in the year and change he’s been mulling it over. “But it’s the best thing anyone’s been able to think up that doesn’t turn anyone into a second class citizen.”

A flash of something hurt and angry crosses Gabriel’s face, but it’s gone before Mitch gets a really good look at it. Stupid. He knows immigrants are treated differently, sometimes, and that having a neurodivergence on record doesn’t make anything easier in the fleet.

“Sorry,” Mitch says. He didn’t mean to bring up something sensitive.

“Don’t be. It’s over.” It doesn’t sound like Gabriel’s over it, whatever it is, but Mitch doesn’t push.

“So. Yeah.” Mitch doesn’t have an erection anymore. The most awkward conversation of his life has completely taken care of that, and it’s kind of a relief not to have to worry about what his dick is doing anymore. “No hand jobs right now. Sorry.”

“I’m sure I’ll survive,” Gabriel says dryly. “It’s only a week, right?”

“Right.” They’ll do the paperwork fast, and they can come back to this once they have the legal go-ahead. Mitch sort of wants to kiss Gabriel again. It was fun, before it got complicated. “Do you wanna, uh.” Mitch licks his lips. He can still feel the echo of Gabriel’s on his. His mouth feels different now, more sensitive, like he’s more aware of it.

“Best not,” Gabriel says with a small smile. “I don’t know about you, but I only have so much self control. Especially when my brain is xanax battered and deep fried.”

“They kept you on xanax?” Mitch asks.

“A much lower dose, but yes. It genuinely does work for me in reasonable quantities, and I’m almost a functional human being on it. We’re not risking me working until we have a little more data on how I respond to a sensible dose, but I’ll be back to my usual duties in a few days, once the storm passes, and we’re going to give things an experimental trial run during the next storm. It might take some tweaking before it’s perfect, but I’ve had about as much as I can take from my brain this week and don’t think I could handle another episode right now.”

“I still… kind of want to talk about what happened.”

“Alright.”

“So… what happened?” Mitch asks when Gabriel doesn’t volunteer anything. Xanax really isn’t good for him, but if it’s the only thing that works, it’s better than being out of his mind with anxiety for a week.

“God. It’s complicated. So what I think happened is I had a panic attack and forgot to take my normal medication, then Dr. Harrod horrendously over corrected the panic attack and I had a minor break from reality while I was too high to reason through whether or not there were actually angels hiding in the vents, so I lived in a hallucination for a few hours until I came down enough to realize that no, that’s nonsense, something has gone wrong, and trace it back to a missed dose. Simple enough problem to correct, and it only took a couple days to even me out enough to be trusted alone.”

Mitch is kind of staring at him. That’s… a lot. It’s a lot to absorb and understand. “So do you… um… break from reality… a lot?” he asks. Holy shit. This is something he has to ask the guy he kind of really likes. Mental health has never been his field of expertise, but it’s starting to look like he needs to learn at least one or two things about it.

“Pretty rarely, actually,” Gabriel says. “Twice so far this year, but it’s been a bad year for it. Before this summer I didn’t have any problems for almost three years. I can take my medication pretty consistently as long as things go right. They’ve just gone wrong more often than normal, recently.”

“What happened this summer?”

“It’s… not a fun story. Can we talk about it some other time?” Gabriel asks quietly.

Mitch needs to keep in mind that he’s having a rough week. He doesn’t have to go over every single bad thing that’s ever happened to him. “Yeah,” he says. “Alright. So why didn’t they trust you to be alone?”

Gabriel sighs and lies down again. He looks exhausted, suddenly. “I’ve hurt people before. Before you, I mean. Violence was a lot more acceptable a response on the island, and I still have a few black marks on my record from before I moved to the _Reliant_. People with a history of resorting to their fists in a disagreement aren’t trusted the same way the rest of you are. Dr. Cook and I have an agreement, so I’m not treated as a violent, insane criminal here, but he still has to follow protocol and keep me some sort of isolated and restrained when I’m not myself.” He sighs. “Did I really pick a lock?”

“Picked a lock, slipped a cuff, and tricked a medic, according to Dr. Cook,” Mitch reports. “What’s your agreement?”

“Bugger. I need to apologize to him. I doubt he holds it against me, based on the whole too high to function matter, but still. We’ve talked, and are in agreement that I’m neither violent nor insane, and my criminal past is entirely behind me. As long as I’m honest and forthcoming about my mental health and keep an open communication about how my medication is working for me and how I’m doing, week to week, we’ll take care of any necessary adjustments in house, and he won’t do any worse than lock me in a private exam room with a medic to watch me if I do have a break and need emergency care.” He laughs at himself without humor. “And then I picked a lock and slipped a handcuff. Great.”

“How’d you get out of the handcuffs?” Mitch asks.

“I can dislocate one of my thumbs,” Gabriel says. He pops a thumb out of its socket and flaps it around, floppy and gross, then cracks it back in. “I can only do it with the left hand, so if you cuffed my right to something, I would have to pick it to get out, and that could take a couple minutes, depending on what tools I had available.”

“You’re a little bit scary sometimes, you know that?” Mitch asks. If this was the first time he met Gabriel, if he didn’t have almost a month of him being gentle and funny and unbearably sweet and shy to compare a couple of really bad days to, he could see believing that he was dangerous or a criminal.

“Oh, I’m terribly scary,” Gabriel says playfully. “Run while you still can. I have a reputation, don’t you know?”

Mitch flops over so his head is on Gabriel’s chest and laughs. “Ooh. A reputation. We’re dealing with a bad boy here. Are you going to ruin my innocence?” he asks.

Gabriel runs his fingers up the back of Mitch’s neck again and Mitch shivers. Why does that feel so good? His suppressants are doing their job again, or maybe it just isn’t enough to crack them without Gabriel kissing him, and nothing important happens. “Maybe,” he teases.

“Good,” Mitch says, and kisses Gabriel’s shoulder.

“Mmm.” He sounds so tired.

“Do you want me to go so you can sleep?” Mitch asks. He really shouldn’t be here right now. He likes Gabriel way too much to be alone with him, the way things are.

“You can stay,” Gabriel mumbles.

A possible future flashes through Mitch’s mind. Staying with Gabriel and taking a nap together. Waking up and trading lazy kisses, still half asleep. Not being careful enough and one or both of them ending up with a hickey somewhere visible. Questions. Hard, serious questions about what Mitch thinks he’s doing with a civilian, with a neurodivergent civilian, with the man who punched him in the face barely three days ago, alone in his room for hours.

“I should go,” he says softly. “I have paperwork to do.” A week, sooner if it gets processed quickly, and then they can do whatever they want together. “The form you need to sign saying you agree to this and I’m not making stuff up should show up in your inbox tomorrow, I think, so keep your eyes open.”

“Mmm. Alright.” His eyes are closed and he looks like he’s on the verge of sleep.

Mitch can send him a message to remind him later tonight or tomorrow, once he’s awake and processing at full speed. He really needs to leave before he does something impulsive. There are no second chances in security, so he needs to do this right the first time.


End file.
